Best Practices For Building Clean Email Lists
The bedrock of great email marketing is having a clean, high-quality email list. It can be tempting to focus on list size, but it's much more important to consider the quality of your subscribers. This email marketing guide will show how to build and maintain clean email lists that will produce real engagement and results.
The Importance of Clean Email Lists
Having a list of clean emails is more than just having valid email addresses on a list. It is also about having subscribers on your list that are engaged and want to hear from you. Clean lists is also more likely to have better deliverability, better engagement, and better ROI.
Top Practices For Building Clean Lists
Double opt-in is the gold standard for list building. This means subscribers have to confirm their email address when signing up. This way you will only have subscribers that are genuine and interested in your content.
How Double Opt-In Works
- 1. The user goes to a webpage and fills out an email sign-up form
- 2. The system automatically sends a confirmation email with a clickable link
- 3. The user clicks the confirmation link to acknowledge their subscription
- 4. The user's email is added to the active subscribers list
Benefits
- • Eliminates the effect of mistyped and fictitious email addresses
- • Confirms the user's authentic interest
- • Increases the overall engagement rates of your email campaigns by 20-30%
- • Reduces the amount of spam complaints
Check email addresses at the moment of entry to catch mistakes instantly and stop invalid addresses from getting into your database.
What It Catches
- • Email syntax mistakes
- • Host domain is invalid
- • Email is a one-time use or disposable email
- • Typo errors (e.g. gmail.con instead of gmail.com)
Implementation
- • Set validation to your sign-up forms and fields
- • Utilize an api for an automated email checking process
- • Present error messages that display meaningful information
- • Provide error suggestions
Your sign-up form needs to be simple and straightforward as it is getting your audience to join your email list and communities.
- Clear Value Proposition: Suggest what the subscribers are going to get and how often are they going to get it
- Minimal Fields: Include only the most necessary data (typically an email address)
- Strong CTA: Use an actionable button text such as, "Get My Free Guide"
- Privacy Assurance: Let them know that their data will not be shared or sold
Buying or renting email lists should never be done, as these lists consist of disinterested, unengaged individuals who never opted in to hear what you have to say.
Why Purchased Lists Fail
- ✗High Bounce Rates (30-50% is the norm)
- ✗Spam Complaints Ruin Sender Reputation
- ✗Violates AntiSpam laws (GDPR, CAN-SPAM)
- ✗Minimal Engagement and Conversions
- ✗Increased Risk of being Blacklisted by ISPs
Segmentation is necessary to improve engagement and decrease the number of unsubscribes.
Segmenting Variables
- • Signup source
- • Interests
- • Engagement
- • Demographics
- • Purchase history
- • Behavior
Benefits of Segmentation
- • Increased open rates (open rates are more than doubled)
- • Better rates of engagement (clicks)
- • Fewer unsubscribes
- • Conversions improved
- • More pertinent and meaningful content
- • Better individuality within your content
Keep subscribers in the loop about what they will get and the frequency of the emails. This will build trust and lead to fewer unsubscribes.
Communication
- • What kind of content to expect
- • How often you will receive emails
- • How to change or manage your preference
- • How to unsubscribe
- • Your policies about privacy, data protection
Keeping List Hygiene
List hygiene, or maintaining a clean and curated list of contacts, is about building the list and continuing to build on it.
- Remove from your list any hard bounces without delay: These are emails that are permanently invalid
- Keep an eye on soft bounces: You should remove email addresses from the list after they have recorded 3-5 consecutive bounces
- Do re-validations at least quarterly: On average email addresses become invalidated at a rate of 22.5% each year
- Delist subscribers from your list: If they have been email inactive for 6 months or more
Before removing subscribers that have become inactive, attempt to re-activate them through campaigns that are specifically designed for re-engagement.
Re-engagement Tactics
- • "We Miss You" letter with a discount
- • Customer Service Survey
- • Preference center so they control touchpoints
- • Content Exclusivity, or Early Access
- • Final last chance email before we drop you
Use these metrics to determine how healthy your email list is and how long issues exist in your email list:
Bounce Rate
Keep it lower than 2%
Open Rate
15 to 25% is typical in the industry
Click Rate
Industry average is 2 to 5%
Unsubscribe Rate
Keep it lower than 0.5%
Spam Complaints
Keep it lower than 0.1%
List Growth Rate
Keep track of the quality, not just the amount
Things You Should Not Do
💢 Do Not Pre-Select Opt-In Boxes
You should always have an explicit touchpoint of consent. Pre-checking boxes presents unengaged subscribers, and potential legal issues.
💢 Not Including an Unsubscribe Button
Do not hide the Unsubscribe button, or else you will directly invite complaints of spam.
💢 All Ignoring of Inactive Subscribers
Do not keep inactive subscribers, or else it will negatively affect your deliverability.
💢 Not Being Consistent With Sending
Do not be inconsistent in your sending. This will hurt engagement and confuse subscribers. Maintain a steady sending schedule!
Recap
Building and keeping a clean email list is a task that you must keep putting effort into, and the rewards just keep coming. Having a focus on quality instead of quantity, good validation, and keeping healthy list hygiene will hand you an engaged subscriber list that is full of potential and will move the needle for your business.
Something to keep in mind is that a smaller list of engaged subscribers is always going to be more productive than a large list of people who aren't dedicated to you. Using the above best practices, you'll create an email list that is clean and actually has value.