You probably remember that cold Saturday evening your mom sat you down and schooled you on personal hygiene. Unfortunately, lessons on Email marketing list hygiene aren’t always as memorable. Yet, there’s nothing more important to an email marketer than building and maintaining a clean email list.

Here’s a clean-list primer to ensure that your email blasts reach those who really want to hear from you.

1. Start clean

Email marketing success starts with quality mailing list. Grow your email list the right way—by asking people to sign up for your content. One of the most effective ways to grow your mailing list is to host a webinar. You want to make sure your webinar provides high-value information to participants. By hosting a richly informative webinar, you have an opportunity to grow your list when customers sign up to participate. Giveaways are also a proven method of growing clean lists. In fact, it’s the top reason people subscribe to email lists, according to a Chadwick Martin Bailey study. On the contrary, if you buy an email list, there’s always a good chance of ending up with email contacts who have no interest in your services. And if you send an email blast to unqualified contacts, they’ll hit the spam button faster than you can say Abracadabra.

2. Remove role accounts

Remove role accounts from your mailing list. Role accounts are department-specific addresses, such as [email protected] or [email protected]. Unbeknownst to most email marketers, role accounts can negatively impact a campaign. For starters, these email addresses probably never opted in to your list and are likely to unsubscribe. Also, your Emails to role accounts likely won’t reach the people you’re really trying to reach (CMOs, account managers, etc.). Role accounts sometimes have multiple people accessing them, thus increasing the likelihood of your emails being deleted or marked as spam. Get them off your list as fast as possible.

3. Scrub fake addresses

Fake addresses muddy your mailing lists. People usually provide a fake address because they are just filling a form to enjoy an offer, or they accidentally typed an incorrect email address. Scrub fake addresses to avoid sending emails to non-responsive recipients. If you have time and manpower, it may be beneficial to review and fix an obviously misspelled address — people sometimes make spelling errors when submitting email addresses (e.g. [email protected]).

4. Minimize abuse reports

You can minimize complaints and abuse reports by getting permission to send emails to subscribers and by keeping your emails relevant. But even legitimate emails can get flagged as spam. When people receive what they consider “junk mail,” they can easily hit the “spam” button. Doing this automatically sends an abuse report to the user’s ISP (Internet Service Provider). Excessive abuse reports or complaints negatively affect your sender reputation.

But this isn’t the only thing going on behind the scenes. ISPs also care about the rate of active subscribers engaging with your emails. So if you send an email to 100 people and only receive two complaints, your complaint rate would appear to be two percent. However ISPs have gotten smarter, and they now view non-responsive behavior as an additional metric to determine the real complaint rate. Essentially, if people stop responding to your emails, their non-responsive behavior is a spam signal to ISPs and your sender reputation takes a hit.

5. Confirm subscriptions

Confirming your subscriptions is a time-tested way to ensure a healthy mailing list. Like a thorough rinse during a shower, that second go-round of confirmation helps keep things clean. The standard way to do this is by using what email marketers refer to as a double opt-in. In plain English, this means that you send a follow-up email to a subscriber asking them to confirm their email subscription. This ensures that you’re only emailing those who want to hear from you.

Key Takeaways

• Start with internally generated emails from interested users.
• Maintaining a clean email list is an ongoing process.
• Verify email lists with a double opt-in.
• Minimize spam traps by scrubbing your lists prior to an email marketing campaign.

Article From: www.dmn3.com