Keeping your email list clean, known as list hygiene, is crucial for ensuring optimal deliverability, enhancing engagement metrics, and potentially reducing email marketing costs.
While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all schedule, a general guideline suggests conducting a comprehensive list cleaning process once or twice a year for most businesses and creators. However, if you have a large list, a high influx of new subscribers, or declining engagement rates, consider performing this task more frequently, possibly every three to six months.
The best method for cleaning your list involves a systematic approach. Firstly, define what constitutes an “inactive subscriber” based on your circumstances. Typically, this includes individuals who haven’t engaged with your emails within a specific timeframe, like the past 90 or 180 days, depending on your email frequency.
Rather than immediately deleting inactive subscribers, it is advisable to initiate a re-engagement or “win-back” campaign. This campaign, typically consisting of one to three targeted emails, aims to rekindle interest within the inactive segment.
Craft compelling subject lines like “Is this goodbye?” and include a clear call to action in the email content, prompting recipients to confirm their interest by clicking a specific link.
Following the re-engagement campaign, you can safely remove subscribers who remain unengaged. Retaining disinterested subscribers can harm your sender reputation and skew performance metrics. Additionally, promptly removing any hard bounces, which are emails that permanently fail due to invalid addresses, is crucial for list health and is usually managed automatically by reputable email service providers.
By implementing this process, you can retain genuinely interested subscribers while efficiently clearing out inactive ones, ensuring your email marketing efforts remain effective and successful.
Best regards,
Sean