Have you been paying attention to the response received from your email communications?
A clean email list can bring benefits to publishers. It helps stay efficient, presents them with the clearest statistics, and allows them to save on operating costs. Have you purged your list recently? If not, take a look at a few of the reasons why email marketers and digital publishers purge their lists from time to time.
Improve email reputation: Sending email to inactive or dead email addresses can result in bounces and undeliverable email. A significant amount of this can result in a negative email reputation. Furthermore, improving your email reputation requires you to pay close attention when users mark your emails as spam or make a complaint against you. The email recipients who complain or mark your content as spam should also be removed from your list, as they are clearly not valuable audience members.
[text_ad]
Advertiser support: The cleaner the list, the better opportunities you have to have advertisers or sponsors aligned with your campaigns. Email advertisers like to see a dedicated community, especially one that has a high open rate that’s receptive to aligned products. The last time we purged our list, our open rate went from 10% to 17%, a response that isn’t unusual.
Save money: Many email service providers charge based on the volume of email you send. Cleaning your list can save you some money, as you won’t be sending as much email to unresponsive email recipients.
Do you have any specific reasons why you purge your email file? Please share your insight in the comments below.
Great article Chris. I wish I have read it before as I learned the hard way being turned down by many ESP in the past. Currently, I follow pretty much your same protocol making all my email marketing campaigns a huge success. Also, I must confess that I was looking all over the internet for affordable tools to clean my mailing lists. I’ve found a handful of very good ones but one of them caught my attention and has become my first stage when scrubbing any of my email lists. It impressed me because it’s really a FREE open source – the reason being is because they are sponsored by strong advertisers (which to me it’s fair as it saves me valuable time and money). Its website URL is http://www.freeemailverifier.com, it has many cool features; one of them is that it’s multilingual so your non-native English speakers can feel more comfortable using/understanding it. It works as a breeze for me!
With my email lists, I take a “use it or lose it” approach. You just can’t set a list aside for months and then expect it to perform well — it will go cold. Under communicating to a list causes people to forget about it. You’ll receive a higher percentage of complaints per email if you don’t ue the list ocasionally.
Keeping a frequent email schedule is certainly helpful in staying top of mind with your audience members.