Email hygiene is the process of maintaining an email database by removing old or incorrect email addresses and replacing them with verified, accepted and accessible email addresses.
It's important because it directly affects the performance of your email marketing. A clean mailing list will improve your brand's sender reputation, deliverability and email engagement. Conversely, a sloppy email list will hurt all of these aspects.
But how do you detect poor email hygiene? And what can you do to make sure your mailing database is spotless?
Signs of poor email hygiene
The health of your email database may be suffering if you experience the following:
- High rebound rates
- Reduced commitment to email
- Increase in the number of casualties
- Increase in the number of spam complaints
The consequences of poor email list hygiene are serious and include tarnishing your brand's reputation by getting blacklisted and/or being labeled as non-compliant with government data regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
These consequences can result in hefty fines and an uphill battle to regain consumer confidence. Fortunately, it's easy to avoid these setbacks with a few simple actions that will maintain your email hygiene.
5 email hygiene tips
1. Invest in sending emails
Good email hygiene depends on the quality of the messages in your database. Email appending helps you assess the quality of your email database and helps you add missing emails or replace bad emails with good emails in your CRM.
An email addendum can also help you fill in other missing information about your current and potential customers, such as demographics, allowing for greater personalization of your communications.
2. Prioritize email personalization
Did you know that personalized email marketing generates an average ROI of 122%? Consumers are more likely to continue interacting with your emails when they are personalized with their name and offer messages that are relevant and specific to their interest in what your brand offers.
Through personalization, the performance of your emails improves, which reinforces the quality of your list. Personalization is achieved by segmenting your mailings, which we will see below.
3. Eliminate inactive subscribers
Inactive subscribers could be adding a lot of dead weight to your database, which in turn affects your email marketing performance. An inactive subscriber is a user who has not interacted with any of your mailings for a certain amount of time, from a few weeks to a few months, depending on how often you send email campaigns.
It is important to keep in mind that some inactive subscribers still have value and may re-engage with your communications in the future.
To determine which inactive subscribers to keep, it is recommended to start a reactivation campaign that recaptures some of those who have not opened your messages in the last time.
4. Prevent your mailings from falling into the spam folder.
Did you know that email spam costs companies $20.5 billion a year? Consequently, every email marketer's worst fear is ending up in the spam folder.
While this can happen from time to time to even the best of marketers, making sure your database is up to date with active subscribers is a very useful tactic to avoid this.
Regularly cleaning your email list by getting rid of bouncing or blocking addresses will keep it healthy and ensure that no deliverability issues hinder your marketing performance.
5. Create suppression lists
You want to send emails that resonate with your subscribers, so when subscribers no longer want to hear from you, your email marketing operations should support that decision.
A suppression list contains email addresses that have unsubscribed or marked your emails as spam. A good suppression list should also contain bounced email addresses.
A high percentage of bounced messages is an obvious sign that email hygiene needs to be improved. Frequent bounces can also lead to your sender going to the spam mailing list. By creating a suppression list, you will preserve the good reputation of your domain and IP, avoid CAN-SPAM penalties and stay away from the spam folder.
