7 Reasons Why You Should Clean Your Email List Regularly

cleaning a mailing list
Do regular cleaning of your mailing list

The value of your email list is only as good as its health. One of the most important, regular tasks of any email marketing campaign is to ensure that you perform maintenance on your mailing list. During maintenance, you should be removing any contacts that regularly bounce or aren’t responding to campaigns.

Here are seven reasons to make cleaning your mailing list a regular task.

1. It Saves Costs

The more people you have on your mailing list, the more it will cost you to run it. Normally this is not done on a per subscriber price. For instance, those with 999 subscribers on Fluttermail cost $17 per month, while those with 1001 subscribers cost $29 per month.

Research has found that about half of all subscribers are inactive. Therefore, a simple maintenance task can keep you in lower level pricinhg tiers.

2. It Improves Analysis

There are many reasons why subscribers become inactive. One reason might be because they’ve changed email addresses. If you have emails being sent to an inactive account, then you can’t analyse campaigns accurately because these dead accounts are skewing results.

Removing dead accounts allows you to focus on people who at least semi-regularly open your email campaigns.

3. Gives You Opportunities To Sell

While removing inactive subscribers is important, it shouldn’t be the first thing to do with subscribers who aren’t opening mail. Some people do read subject lines and go straight to your website to make a purchase. Therefore, when identifying those who aren’t responding any more, you should look to create a re-engagement campaign. Research has shown that inactive subscribers are worth about 32% of active subscribers.

This should encourage people to tell you they’re still interested in hearing from you. Those that don’t take any action can then be removed from your list.

4. Find Malicious Emails In Your Subscriber List

It’s important that you find those on your mailing list that are spam or malicious accounts. These email accounts can cause your business real harm. Email addresses within these categories should be removed without question.

Malicious email accounts can often be spotted manually because they don’t have corresponding names with email addresses or weird email addresses (i.e. XtrebleYU@domain.co.uk).

5. You Can Remove Subscribers That Have No Value To You

Sometimes people subscribe to your business’ mailing list who have no value to you. For instance, if you sell only in the US, Canada or another country and you get subscribers from the EU, Russia or another area, then you can remove those subscribers.

Those that aren’t of value to your organisation are just costing you money and skewing your statistics. They’re also getting irrelevant content which won’t help with your reputation.

6. Its Easier To Do It Regularly

When you have thousands of subscribers on your mailing list, if you only check them rarely, then it will take up a lot of your time. Instead, checks done on a regular basis take up less time and allow you to be more responsive to changes.

Regular checks can be scheduled every one to three months. It shouldn’t take any more than a few hours work, but it can save hundreds of dollars a year.

7. It’s Good For Compliance

There are lots of email marketing laws that protect consumers from illicit marketing emails. While subscribers might have signed up, that doesn’t always mean that they want to receive marketing content. They just don’t read the sign-up details properly. In addition, some subscribers might try to unsubscribe from your mailing list, but don’t complete the process.

By regularly scheduling in maintenance for your mailing list, you can remove people who have no interest in your marketing content and comply with legal requirements.

Conclusion

Maintaining your email marketing list is really important. It can help your business to be more effective in marketing, finances and compliance. Therefore, you should always be looking at doing maintenance every one to three months.

When was the last time you completed maintenance on your email list? When do you next plan to do this?

Let us know in the comments below.

Image via Pixabay.

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