The Importance of Email List Hygiene

This article was written by guest blogger, Aleksandr Botvynko, Outreach & SEO Associate at SendPulse.

When it comes to building a digital marketing strategy, email has always been and still remains a go-to solution for many businesses and marketers. It may come as a surprise but even in the time of social media, chatbots, and messenger marketing, email campaigns are very effective in terms of customer retention. An email list is a cornerstone of any promotional email campaign and it’s almost impossible to overestimate the importance of keeping it in pristine condition. 

A quality email list is a sure way to secure higher open and click-through rates as well as the ROI of your campaign. Here are some ideas to keep in mind while building an email marketing strategy. 

1. Skip on buying an email list
Even if you haven’t heard about GDPR laws or CAN-SPAM act, there is always a common sense that tells you it’s a bad idea. For once, the people on the list you buy expressed no consent to receive any communication from your business. As a result, they will most likely delete your email without reading or what is even worse, mark it as spam which it basically is. Using a purchased email list puts your sender’s reputation at risk and restoring it takes time and effort.

2. Grow your email list naturally
Collecting your clients’ contact information is something that you should be doing from the get-go if customer retention is important to you. A more classical way to collect subscribers would be incorporating a good old responsive subscription form for your website. Single or double opt-in both work perfectly well to ensure subscribers are getting what they have signed up for. 

Alternatively, there are chatbots that get the job done just as well, plus they can serve as the first line of customer support. Chatbots are really great at collecting your customer’s contact information or other details that can later be used for email list segmentation and email personalization. You can learn how to create a chatbot all by yourself and give it a personality that will help get the customers to interact with it and share necessary information. 

3. Verify your email list

In case you already have an email list at your disposal it’s important to keep it clean from invalid, misspelled, and abandoned emails. Bulk email verifier is designed for exactly this task in mind. 

Decent email verifiers, like the one by SendPulse allows you to perform both single email and bulk email verification. This is quite handy when it comes to managing the budget for your email campaign. 

As a result, you get a squeaky-clean email list and a detailed report on the performed verification. This helps to improve your deliverability rates and, as a consequence, your ROI since you are no longer sending your campaigns to dead-end addresses. 

4.  Take on an email list segmentation
Divide and conquer. Your email list is not just addresses. There are people behind those nicknames and domains, and they represent different age, geographical, customer lifecycle segments. Keeping these things in mind while creating your next email marketing campaign will sure boost your customer’s engagement. 

Summing things up, it’s pretty obvious that understanding the importance of creating and maintaining your own email list is a first step to building a better email marketing strategy. A verified and well-segmented email list goes a long way towards your ROI and is a truly valuable asset in the long run.