By Savicom News

List hygiene involves explicitly updating engaged contacts and removing inactive, invalid, and duplicate emails. Engagement includes recent opt-ins, subscribers that have been billed within the past 12 months, and openers and clickers within the last 12 months.

Email list cleaning is an essential email marketing strategy and should be performed at least on a monthly basis. By keeping your emails relevant, only those who are truly interested will continue to subscribe.

That being said, following email list best practices including refraining from mailing to purchased lists, removing role accounts (i.e. “sales@xyzcorp.com”) from databases, and confirming subscriptions through a double opt-in, improve the quality of your lists—and your deliverability. This ensures readers are actually interested in your content and prevents your open and click rates from distorting. Abuse reports are sent to the user’s ISP when they press the “spam” button, labeling you with a negative reputation. In fact, ISPs also observe the rate of active subscribers to calculate your complain rate. For better deliverability, use metrics such as opens, clicks, and website activity and respond to unsubscribe requests and bounce data immediately.

With the right cleaning, you will not only save money and attain a great reputation, but you can also achieve higher deliverability and a better conversion rate!