Email List Hygiene: What, When And Why

Not a soul has responded to your message. Despite putting in all of this effort, your eCommerce email campaign has flopped miserably. You’ve worked hard to create an eCommerce email marketing campaign, and you’re sure it will be a success. But you don’t get the results you want. No one responds to your message. It’s frustrating when you put so much effort into something and it doesn’t work out.

Email hygiene refers to deleting inactive (cold) email subscribers from your future email marketing campaigns and maintaining your remaining list by sending them regular emails. This will ensure that you are only emailing people who actually want to receive your messages, which will also help to avoid your email being marked as spam.

In order to get your emails delivered to the inbox and stay there, you’ll need to focus on email list hygiene. ESPs are constantly improving their ability to identify the types of emails that recipients want to see in their inboxes. This necessitates maintaining a clean email list in order to ensure successful delivery of messages. ESPs evaluate the engagement level of recipients with the emails they receive.

Email list hygiene refers to the process of unsubscribing inactive or unengaged subscribers from an email list. This ensures that marketers only target those who are interested in their emails, resulting in a more engaged subscriber base. This, in turn, saves time and money and improves email marketing ROI.

The email terminology every small business owner should get familiar with

Engagement

In a nutshell, engagement is defined as interaction with your email, such as an open or click. However, from the perspective of an ESP, engagement is a bit more technical.

ESPs consider “engagement” as one or more of the following:

Recent opt-ins

This refers to email subscribers who have given permission to receive marketing emails from your company. Note that some of these permission-based emails may be from false or illegitimate addresses, so it’s crucial to keep track of engagement to remove these types of addresses quickly.

Purchasers or subscribers that have been billed within the last 120 days

Although sometimes people do not realize it, when they purchase a product or service, or subscribe to your email list, they are usually giving you permission to continue sending them email marketing materials. However, if you include checkboxes and confirmations, people will be more likely to engage with your emails.

Opens and clicks in the last 120 days

The two actions you should monitor after adding a subscriber to your marketing list are opens and clicks. While opens can be effective, clicks are a more accurate representation of engagement because a subscriber’s email program may not record an open if the subscriber chooses not to display images or views the email in the preview pane.

Warm email list

A good email list is made up of subscribers who have given you permission to email them, been contacted recently, and are regularly interacting with your emails.

Many small businesses find this to be a real challenge.

Some companies have placed a sign-up box on their website and have written a compelling lead gen asset, but they have not been active in collecting email addresses. Others are regularly sending emails but are not getting much engagement in the form of clicks, opens, and other actions.

This situation is not a good investment of your time and can damage your relationship with your email service provider which could get you blacklisted. Keeping your email list up to date should be a top priority for your business.

Cold email list

If you haven’t sent any email communications to your list in the last four months, you can consider it a cold email list.

Unfortunately, the following list of email addresses should not receive any email communication. Failure to communicate with subscribers after they have given you their email address is similar to getting a love interest’s phone number and never calling or texting them. It is just bad email etiquette and in a world where people expect an immediate response, it will not be received well by your subscribers or your ESP.

As an eCommerce business you’ll likely have a bunch of different contacts. For example, your contact database may include:

• Visitors to your site who want to learn more about your business
• Leads (people who are likely to become customers)
• Existing customers
• Past customers

That means you’ll also have several email lists, like:

• A customer email list, to which you’ll send automated emails based on behavior and purchase history (for example, abandoned cart emails)
• A marketing email list, with people who you hope will become customers
• An email list for those who have opted out of marketing emails, but still need transactional emails about their account, orders, purchases and shipments

1. Falling open and click rates

One of the most obvious signs of a decline in email marketing effectiveness is a decline in open and click rates. Every email marketing service provides stats on what percentage (and how many) of your subscribers opened your emails and clicked on the links.

It is most important to see if email open rates are static, improving, or decreasing from your perspective.

2. Rising unsubscribe rates

If you notice more people unsubscribing from your emails, it’s a sign that they’re no longer interested in hearing from you.

The average unsubscribe rate for most email lists is between 0.2 percent and 0.5 percent. If your unsubscribe rate is above 0.5 percent, you should look at cleaning your list.

3. A high bounce rate

View the bounce report in your email marketing software to find out which emails were not delivered due to an incorrect email address, full mailbox, or other technical reasons.

An increasing bounce rate means that more of your email addresses are no longer valid, which will also lower your open and click rates. This can eventually damage your ability to deliver emails altogether.

4. More spam complaints

Your email service provider will let you know about any spam complaints, which you should try to keep to a minimum.

Although more spam complaints may not always indicate that subscribers see you as a spammer, it is still something to be aware of.

The vast majority of people will take the easy way out when they receive an email they don’t want by clicking the “Spam” button. This has a significant impact on email deliverability.

5. Poor deliverability

Email deliverability is the ability to get your email into people’s inboxes.

Luckily, email list hygiene will remedy these issues, because it will help you send your emails to a more engaged, receptive list. eCommerce businesses will get the following benefits:

1. Fewer spam complaints and better deliverability

An email list that is more engaged and active results in fewer spam complaints. This, in turn, leads to increased deliverability so that more of your emails reach your subscribers. Additionally, when they do receive your emails, there are other benefits like more clicks and purchases.

2. Improved open and click rates

Removing subscribers who don’t want your emails will result in an immediate improvement in open and click rates.

3. Fewer unsubscribes and bounces

When you prune your list, you are sending emails only to people who want them. This means that unsubscribes will be less common. In addition, when more emails are received by subscribers who want them, it is more likely that they will take action on the emails.

4. Better email marketing statistics

A more reliable email marketing strategy can be achieved by removing unengaged subscribers from your list. This way you can plan your campaigns more effectively and measure their success with actual numbers, rather than including those who are not interested in your brand.

5. Improved ROI for eCommerce email marketing

Most email marketing providers, including Jilt, charge based on the number of contacts on your list. So, if you have 1,000 people on your list who aren’t engaged, you’re still paying the provider to email them, even if you’re not getting a response. To save money, trim your list and you can trim your costs, giving you an improved ROI for your email marketing.

eCommerce email list hygiene step-by-step

1. Check that you’re not the problem

The first step is to check if there is a deliverability issue. If emails are not getting delivered, people will not be able to take action on them. A deliverability checker can be used to determine this.

Some common email deliverability checkers include:

• SendForensics
• Mx Toolbox
• IS Not Spam
• Mail Tester

It will include a list of some of the issues that affect deliverability, like:

• Email authentication
• Whether your sender email address has been blacklisted
• Whether there are emails from purchased email lists (that’s a no-no)
• If there’s a problem with your sender IP address

2. Remove inactive subscribers

You will be able to remove subscribers who are not interested from your list once the win-back campaign is over.

3. Check your bounces

Email marketing services all provide statistics on the number of bounced emails. Sometimes, you can improve your list of subscribers simply by looking at those stats. It’s easy to make a mistake when typing in an email address, which means that people who want to receive your emails might not get them.

This can be fixed by editing the email domain manually if there are transposed letters (like gmail.com or yahoo.com). If it is clear that a person is using a version of their name in the email address and there is an obvious typo, this will also work.

4. Remove unwanted contacts

The reason why subscribers submit spam reports is because they receive the same email from the sender multiple times. It might not be the sender’s fault as sometimes people subscribe with different email addresses.

To remove duplicates from your contact list, export it into Excel or Google Sheets and use the built-in tools to find and delete them.

If you are someone who is concerned about others taking advantage of your offers without revealing their real email, you may want to consider using a disposable email address. This way, people will be able to grab your offer without having to worry about their email being spammed. Additionally, your email service provider will usually be able to catch any unwanted contacts, but it is still a good idea to check just to be safe.

Email list cleaning

The first step you should take to have a clean email list is to make sure everyone on it wants to receive your emails. This way it will be easier to get people to take action and be engaged with what you’re offering.

Send a re-engagement email that takes one of the following approaches:

• Asks people who have opened your email in the last six months to click a link and confirm they still want to be on your list
• Gives list members different subscription options, such as receiving every email or signing up for a digest
• Confirms that their email address is still current and that they don’t want to update their email preferences

Evaluate cause of death

The people who subscribed to your list were probably not dead on arrival. As the person who owns the list, it’s important that you figure out what’s causing the drop in interest, so you can fix the problem.

Some common causes of decreased email engagement include:

• You didn’t send any emails, so they were left wanting more content.
• You sent out promotional emails without creating value for your audience.
• Your content failed to connect with your audience.
• Your message may have gotten lost in the shuffle because your subscribers are getting too many messages.

If you want to keep your subscribers happy, you need to find out what they want and give it to them. The best way to do this is to ask them directly. Try sending out a survey or questionnaire to get an idea of what your subscribers are looking for. Once you know what they want, you can start working on creating content that they will love.

It’s important to understand what your audience does want if you want to improve your email campaign or re-engage with them after a long absence.

Ask them.

Why did you sign up for our email list? What can we do to make sure you stick around?

If you want to test specific hypotheses, use a survey to collect data from a sample of people.

Re-engaging a cold email list

If you want to reconnect with your list or just change the way you interact with them, make it an event.

Invite your subscribers to join you for an exclusive training session or Q&A session on Facebook Live. Once the event is over, send out the recorded version to everyone who couldn’t make it.

Create a detailed giveaway, such as a white paper or e-book, that includes valuable material such as interviews, templates, or original data.

Create a course that covers multiple topics and release it over the span of a few weeks to keep your audience engaged.

Form healthy email habits now to grow your client base for the long haul

If you’re having trouble getting people to engage with your email list, take a minute to assess the situation. See what you can do to provide value, and then work hard to build (or rebuild) these important relationships with your clients. If you’re smart about it, you can make your email list a profitable way to connect with clients over the long term.