Every marketer dreams of landing in subscribers' inboxes and obtaining high engagement metrics. However, having a fresh and clean list is one of the easiest and most important ways to achieve high deliverability scores.
As most things are getting smarter over time, email service providers (ESPs) have also become smarter about what recipients want to receive in their inboxes.
If you are not paying attention to your lists’ hygiene, you’re probably wasting time testing subject lines and optimizing your content, and money sending your content to unengaged users.
This article explains the following concepts:
What is list hygiene?
List hygiene is cleaning your low-engaged subscribers.
Even if you have the most engaged list in the world, there are many reasons for your list to go stale and decrease your deliverability scores. Your subscribers may lose interest in your emails, your content, or sending frequency may not fit them, or they can be affected by improvements implemented on internet service providers’ (ISP) spam filtering systems, inbox providers’ preference changes, new rules and regulations, or new features that become available.
Monitoring your lists and their activity metrics is the key to keeping them qualified. By keeping your lists qualified, you will improve your email campaigns' performance and save money by not sending emails to bad or low-quality subscribers. This will eliminate your risk of getting suspended or blocked by your ESP or ISP and decrease your spam report rate by the end of the day.
How do you maintain list hygiene?
- Do not buy any email lists: Purchasing email lists is one of the biggest things that can harm your reputation.
- Try to avoid handwritten data: Reading someone else’s handwriting can be difficult and can end up causing misspellings. Instead, use digital sources to collect leads.
- Remove unengaged users: We know how hard it is to obtain email data. You can try re-engaging these users first, but it's time to remove them if more than 10% of your list is unengaged. You can exclude low-engaged users from your emails when sending newsletter campaigns.
- Validate your contacts: Validate your data to see their deliverability score. With our Email product, you can validate your lists and see the overall and contact-based deliverability scores.
Some more tips to increase deliverability
- Use segments to target your audience: If you send an email in Spanish to your subscribers who live in France, most of them will either not open it or immediately throw it in the trash.
- Try to avoid the spam filter: Picking a catchy subject line or personalizing your email content will help you avoid the spam filter.