How to Maintain Email List Hygiene & Its Benefits

Have you ever wondered how to keep your email marketing campaigns running smoothly and avoid the dreaded spam folder?

Well, it all comes down to maintaining email list hygiene.

A whopping 80% of marketers believe that email marketing directly impacts their customer retention rates. That's right!

Email remains one of the most effective communication channels for businesses, especially in the B2B space. But here's the catch: if your email list is filled with invalid or unresponsive addresses, you're jeopardizing the success of your campaigns.

To prevent this nightmare scenario, email list cleaning is essential. So, let’s have a closer look at why email list hygiene is crucial and how you can follow this practice.

Email list hygiene is all about keeping your subscriber list in good shape. It involves removing inactive or cold email addresses and maintaining healthy email-sending practices to keep your list engaged. .

Practicing email hygiene regularly ensures you're only sending emails to people who genuinely want to receive them. This not only improves your chances of avoiding the dreaded spam folder but also helps you maintain a positive relationship with your audience.

Email List Hygiene contributes to better deliverability and audience reach.

And when we avoid regular email list cleaning we are left with poor quality data that jeopardizes your email list quality and campaign performance. Here are some statistics to help us understand why email list hygiene matters-

Just imagine the impact of sending your carefully crafted emails to invalid email addresses! It not only wastes your resources but also damages your sender's reputation, potentially leading to your emails being flagged as spam or even blocked altogether.

Email deliverability is the star of email statistics-- it is the rate at which emails actually make it to subscriber inboxes. It deserves greater attention, though; a high deliverability rate implies that you are doing many critical things in the correct way.

As your deliverability rate lowers, the emails you send start landing in the spam folder or even get blocked by the ISP. This hampers your reputation and will bring down your deliverability much further.
But regular email list cleaning and good list hygiene ensure that your emails are delivered to the recipient's inboxes rather than getting flagged as spam or ending up in the junk folder.

Bounce rate is an imperative sign demonstrating the general health of your email list.

List cleaning keeps your bounce rate lesser by expelling the invalid, suspended, and counterfeit emails that are responsible for most of the hard bounces and recognizing risky ones that could prompt extra hard or soft bounces.

If your bounce rate goes over 3 to 5%, you will quickly observe a negative impact on your deliverability and inboxing rates. At 8 to 10%, your delivery rates will begin to drop drastically.

Also, a few systems utilized by email service providers, similar to Omnivore via MailChimp, will suspend your account if it surpasses the standard bounce rate for your industry.

According to research by Return Path, 79% of emails overall found their way to their target inbox and a full 13% of all emails sent ended up in the spam folders.

Of all that mail delivered to the spam folders, just about 1% of them were found by the user and moved to the inbox. If you’re expecting a strong engagement with your campaign, then you’ll have to find your own specific manner in the inbox.

Email marketing best practices play a role in reaching out to the targeted inboxes however good email list hygiene is essential for a successful inboxing strategy as well. Regardless of how good your email copy is, if your business is known for sending emails to unresponsive, closed, or inactive accounts then there's a higher possibility that your emails will get flagged and redirected to the spam folder.

Undelivered emails and spam traps will put your sender's reputation at risk. Once you get an awful reputation, you will soon find yourself blocked from the inboxes you need to reach.

What's more, you don't have only one reputation to secure. Quite a long time ago, your email sender reputation was about server (or IP) reputation. While server reputation is still imperative, today it's critically important to keep an eye out for your domain reputation.

Your domain reputation reflects your all-time business image and will follow you wherever you go—regardless of whether you change servers or switch email service providers —and it plays an undeniable role in deliverability. A bad domain reputation doesn't simply affect your marketing endeavors: your sales and customer service teams may begin finding their day-by-day communications lost in customers' spam folders too.

Clean your email list consistently to get rid of any hazardous addresses and counteract pointless harm to your reputation.

There are some squeaky wheels on the Internet— individuals who routinely report business emails as spam and individuals who go to such an extreme as to call up your company or ESP to complain about unwanted emails. They may even threaten to sue.

Another key threat is spam traps, otherwise called honeypots, which are valid email addresses made explicitly to catch spammers at work. They are like kryptonite for your sender reputation and can even get you blacklisted by ISPs.

The best email verification services refresh their databases of known spam traps persistently, to enable you to abstain from being entangled by one. No service can honestly guarantee to expel all spam traps from your lists. Be that as it may, following a regular email list cleaning best practices will keep you off the ISP hit list.

At an estimated rate of around 22% per year, people switch jobs, change addresses, or otherwise disappear from the digital space.

But the email service providers will still charge based on the number of subscribers you have in your email list or on the volume of emails you send, irrespective of the fact the subscribers are active or not.

Hence, by maintaining email list hygiene, you can identify and remove inactive or unengaged subscribers who are unlikely to open or engage with your emails. Consequently, you will reduce the total number of emails sent, resulting in potential cost savings.

It feels incredible to hit benchmarks for email collection. Your company database simply hit a large portion of a million contacts. That is extraordinary! In any case, if you're clinging to dead leads in your database just to pad your stats it is only vanity. Furthermore, it's unquestionably harming your deliverability.

A good strategy sometimes involves making tough decisions. Swallow your pride and chop your list down to its actual size by dispensing with invalid addresses, at that point, you can begin settling on better strategic decisions for your business dependent on accurate information.

It's possible that some of your audience subscribed but then experienced a shift in their lives that left your content unhelpful to them. Your engagement rates might well have dipped since they decided to ignore your requests to unsubscribe and just delete your emails.

Additionally, people switch jobs, email providers, and email accounts, which increases bounce rates for your organization.

Because of this, it's crucial to make sure you schedule an email list hygiene routine a couple of times a year. Removing names from your list may seem strange, but it's better to have a smaller, more attentive audience than a larger, more disinterested one.

Invalid, incorrect, and bounced emails can take a serious toll on your email deliverability and email ROI.

There are several reasons behind bounced emails, including:

The best chance for your emails to reach your users' inboxes is to monitor bounces to keep a positive reputation with mailbox providers.

Inactive subscribers are individuals who never open, click, or otherwise engage with your emails.

It is mandatory (by rule and by all credible ESPs) that you include an unsubscribe option in your emails, so that individuals may opt out of using it.

👉Must Read: Complete Email List Cleaning Guide

Now you are aware of the importance of regularly scrubbing your email lists, you should always execute an email list cleaning before your next bulk email send-out. Freshly cleaned lists will guarantee that you are just sending your messages to solid leads. Also, bring out prompt positive outcomes that bring you more noteworthy profits for the time, productivity, creativity, and money that you put resources into your mailing efforts. Keeping this up regularly won’t ever need to stress over getting blacklisted by ESPs for sending your campaigns to “bad” addresses.