Effortlessly Clean Your Email List With These Tips

You’ve collected the email addresses, emailed the email addresses, and seen results from the email addresses. Now, you probably need to delete some email addresses. 

Email list cleaning sounds painful! When you’ve put a lot of work into growing your list, purposefully deleting some of your subscribers feels like a jab to the chest. Your list numbers are supposed to go up! Why would you willingly remove people?

But just as pruning a plant can stimulate growth and result in a bigger, healthier shrub, your email marketing program can flourish if you continually remove the dead limbs and unhealthy leaves.

What is Email List Cleaning?

Email list cleaning is the process of removing email addresses from your email marketing system that don’t have a healthy record of engagement with your messages. This lack of engagement is usually because they haven’t been opening or clicking your emails lately or the addresses were invalid from the beginning. 

No matter how great your emails are, some subscribers will stop engaging with them. They may have:

• Changed their main email addresses
• Stopped checking that particular email address
• Changed jobs or left schools and no longer have access to that email address
• An email provider may have routed your emails to an inbox tab they don’t check
• Decided they simply no longer need your product, service, or information

Email list cleaning should be a critical aspect of every email marketing program to help improve email engagement, but it is often overlooked until it’s too late. Bad things start to happen when you don’t clean your list. And they will likely get worse until you do. 

Why You Need to Clean Your List

Email providers, like Gmail, want to protect their clients from unwanted email. When people stop opening or clicking on your messages, providers notice. If your emails start to bounce, they will question how old your list is. They count these things against you, the sender, who they identify by your IP and domain address. 

Email providers also set traps. 

When email addresses are abandoned, providers sometimes use them as spam traps to catch people buying old email lists and sending uninvited spam. If you send an email to someone who hasn’t engaged with your emails in months, you may accidentally be sending it into a trap. 

The more these things happen, the more these email providers think you might be a spammer. To protect their users, they may start sending your emails straight to the spam folder or stop delivering them altogether! They will ding your IP address and domain, hurting your deliverability across the board. 

It’s not uncommon: 20.4% of all emails are either not delivered, or end up in spam.

When this happens, not only will those email providers be upset with you, but your email service provider (ESP) you use to send your emails will be, too. They might even suspend your account.  When ESPs see high bounce rates and spam complaints, they would rather not risk their sending reputations getting tarnished by hosting you — a potential email spammer. 

Improve Your Marketing With a Clean Email List

So now that we know what will happen if we don’t clean our email lists, let’s switch to the positives. You can bask in the benefits once you weed out all the unengaged and spam addresses in your list. Without them weighing you down, you’ll get:

• Higher Engagement. You’ll be emailing the audience who wants to hear what you have to say, so you can expect your open and click rates to go up when you remove the dead weight. You might even see the raw numbers increase due to better deliverability and inbox placements. 
• Better Inbox Placement. As email providers see a high percentage of people engaging with your emails, they are less likely to sort them into the spam filter. 
• Improved Deliverability Rates. By removing the addresses that are more likely to bounce and staying on the email providers’ good sides, your deliverability rate will increase.
• Better Domain and IP Reputations. When the email providers like what they see, you’ll maintain good domain and IP reputations, which impact your deliverability.
• Fewer Spam Complaints. The people you’re emailing with have a history of engaging with your emails lately, so as long as you have a straightforward way to unsubscribe, they are likely to go that route if they want to leave your list instead of marking you as spam. 

Techniques and Tools for Email List Cleaning

There are several ways to clean a dirty email list. Manual processes, automations, and third-party services can all help you restore it to a clean state. 

When email list cleaning, you’re looking for:

• Fake and invalid email addresses (think “no@no.com”).
• Email addresses with syntax errors (they might involve typos, like @gmial.com instead of gmail.com).
• Email addresses that have not engaged with your emails in a certain period. These include addresses your subscribers no longer use or have been turned into spam traps.

If you have a small list and the time to spend on it, you can download reports from your ESP and manually look for addresses to remove from your lists. If your ESP can build automations, you can use them to create a segment that matches your criteria, and you may even choose to remove them automatically on an ongoing basis. Some ESPs create subscriber segments of engagement for you right out of the box. 

If you need help outside your ESP, you may want to consider email verification services. Below, we examine some of the many options available. 

Best Practices for Effective Email List Cleaning

We hope that by now, you are convinced that good email list hygiene is critically important to your email marketing efforts. Here are some of the best practices to keep your list healthy and clean. 

Segment Less Active Subscribers

Based on your list size and sending frequency, build a segment of subscribers who have stopped engaging with your emails or are at risk of doing so. 

Build a Re-Engagement Campaign

Build a series of emails to send to your less active subscribers, encouraging them to take action to show they want to continue to receive emails from you (pessimists may call this a break-up series). 

Your personalized message or content can help them re-engage with your brand. 

These emails could be as simple as “click here to keep receiving emails.” Others may offer a way to change email preferences to ensure they are only getting the emails from you they want to receive. 

Regularly Remove Inactive Subscribers 

If your segment has not engaged with your re-engagement campaigns, it’s time to break up. Remove them from your list! Don’t worry; they can always opt in again later when it’s a better time. 

The Best Email List Cleaning Services

Whether you don’t have the time or the knowledge to tackle email list cleaning on your own, you can choose from many email validation services to outsource the job. 

List cleaning is all these services do, so they have the tools and the insight to catch issues you might not see while going through them much faster. 

Some of these services operate as one-time scenarios — upload your list and get a clean one back. Others can be an ongoing operation where they verify newly submitted emails in real-time, often integrated right into your ESP. 

EmailListVerify offers a budget-friendly way to keep your list clean without sacrificing accuracy, though it may take a bit longer to see results. It integrates with popular ESPs and allows you to choose between a subscription or a pay-as-you-go model.

NeverBounce boasts a 99.9% accuracy guarantee, unmatched by any others we’ve seen. Quick turnaround times and ESP integration make it a solid choice for businesses of all sizes, but its pricing model rewards larger lists with more discounts.

ZeroBounce stands out for its helpful documentation and onboarding while maintaining a 98% accuracy rate. It offers advanced segmentation tools and blocklist monitoring, with pricing that include subscriptions and pay-as-you-go options.

QuickEmailVerification offers a straightforward, user-friendly approach to list cleaning. Compatible with many ESPs, it’s a solid pick for marketers seeking something simple and effective. It operates on a subscription-based pricing model.

VerifyBee verifies emails and phone numbers. It also offers ESP integration and subscription-based access, making it a great choice for marketers with multi-channel communication strategies.

Bouncer prides itself on its commitment to data security and GDPR compliance. It also has positive reviews claiming excellent customer service. It offers subscription and pay-as-you-go pricing options. 

MailerCheck cleanses your list and fine-tunes email content for better sender reputation and deliverability. It integrates with several ESPs and offers subscription and pay-as-you-go pricing options.

Improve Your Email Marketing with Content Journey

There’s a lot that goes into an email marketing strategy, but maintaining a healthy, clean list is a large part of ensuring your emails reach your subscribers.If you need a hand developing and implementing email marketing, let Content Journey help! We develop email campaigns into powerful tools for building relationships and driving business growth. Contact Content Journey today, and let’s transform your email marketing together.