Email hygiene is the habit of keeping your mailing list warm and free of cold (inactive) users. This means that your mailing list should only or mostly have subscribers who regularly open, click, click-through, or make purchases from your email campaigns.
This is very important for email marketers and online businesses because failing to practice email hygiene would cause internet service providers and email service providers to mark your email campaign sender’s address, IP address, and business domain as a spam-sender.
Once you’re labeled as a spam-sender, your marketing emails will be denied, or it would be harder to reach out to new customers as well as keep in touch with your existing patrons. These are the essential tips you should follow to maximize your email deliverability while protecting your sender’s reputation.
1. Evaluate the Reason Behind the Lack of Subscriber Engagement
Before removing inactive customers from your mailing list, you must first determine why these inactive users do not respond to your emails. Some users might be inactive because they don’t use emails too often, others ignore your emails because your campaigns do not reflect their interests, and some have forgotten their passwords.
Immediately removing subscribers just because of inactivity will lower your chances of making profits even if your marketing emails are well-crafted. Remember, not every campaign works on all types of users.
2. Segment Your Email List Rather Than Delete Subscribers
By evaluating the reason why some of your subscribers have gone inactive, you can put these users into segments based on their reason for inactivity. This strategy is beneficial because you’ll be able to craft a targeted campaign designed to make inactive customers re-engage in the future or make the right email campaign template that influences the disinterested users.
You must be resourceful in managing your mailing list because gaining new customers is more challenging and more costly than impressing the existing ones.
3. Remove Spam Traps
Spam traps or honeypots are tools used to identify and monitor spam emails. They are often used by anti-spam organizations, Internet Service Providers, and corporations. Even if your emails have good intentions, failing to remove spam traps will cause your IP address and domain to be marked and list denied. This affects your email campaigns’ deliverability and sending reputation, which in turn, ruins your eCommerce experience.
To remove spam traps, start by removing users who have been inactive for six months. If the spam trap is still present, narrow the time window to 3 months. You can also contact a professional to locate the spam trap without removing users from your mailing list.
4. If You Should Buy Email Lists, Only Do it From Trusted Vendors
One of the tips to avoid getting a spam trap is to avoid buying email lists. Although this is very tempting to new email marketers as a way to grow their subscriber pool, it is highly suggested that you check the reputation of the vendor selling you the mailing list.
Some of the emails in the purchased lists are already inactive. Other users haven’t given consent to have their email addresses sold and would immediately report campaign senders they aren’t’ familiar with. The worst case of them all is that some emails in the purchased lists are spam addresses.
5. Use the Double Opt-In Signup Method
Spam addresses are email addresses that contain spam traps. These addresses are mostly bots designed to detect spam senders and need to join the senders mailing list to detect the IP address, email, address, or domain for spamminess.
Besides buying email lists from trusted sources to prevent bots from joining your mailing list, you can set up a double opt-in signup function. The signup function in your mailing list will block the bots out, keeping your email sending address, IP address, and domain’s reputation clean.
6. Seek Professional Advice From Expert Resources
If you think you lack the skill to maintain the cleanliness in your mailing list alone properly, it’s best to talk to those who are adept at doing it first. Customer service representatives from email marketing services such as Ongage, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, or HubSpot are your best go-to’s.
The email addresses of the customer service representatives are readily available on the domain of these marketing services. Blogs about email marketing are also available for you to read on their websites.
7. Re-engage a Cold Email List
As mentioned before, it’s best to work on re-engaging your inactive customers first before removing them from your mailing list. One of the best ways to do this is to send them a newsletter on what they have missed.
Conclusion
Remember the causes of a cold mailing list: They include buying email addresses, not setting up a double opt-in signup method, and your content no longer interests your subscribers. The first two causes are easily avoided, but most email marketers often overlook the third one.
So if your mailing list has a couple of inactive users, figure out why they are going cold. Segment them based on their reasons. Craft an email campaign for each segment that would re-spark the interest of the users in your business.
If they are still inactive, keep re-engaging them at least two to three times before finally scrubbing them off from your mailing list.