Remember those numerous prime-time skin care ads that bombard you with the benefits of scrubbing off dead skin cells to reveal a younger, fresher, more beautiful skin? The concept pretty much holds ground when it comes to maintaining your email lists as well ;)
As a marketer, you might’ve often gasped wide-eyed at exaggerated soft bounce rates post an email campaign. A closer examination of these ids will lead you to a pool of users that have been inactive for a prolonged period.
Today most Email Service Providers (ESPs), especially the big three – Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail – have exponentially evolving algorithms that enhance spam filtering for providing a better user experience. One particular attribute of algorithms across ESPs is that if a user isn’t interacting with your mails for a considerably prolonged period, your mails automatically start landing in their Spam/Junk folders. Frequent emailing to such ids harms the sender’s IP reputation resulting in IP blacklisting. In simple English, this means that all your mails start landing in the Spam/Junk folder if you continue to send mails to a prehistoric list without checking if the ids within are still active.
Ever expanding mailing lists make list management difficult. Many-a-times users abandon email addresses for a variety of reasons – excessive spam, job change, forgotten username and password, etc. – leaving these ids unattended.
All of the above situations lead to a common conclusion – that your mailing lists get stale over time! It’s an inevitable truth; everything perishes in time. While evolving email marketing software providers observe best practices in order to maintain clean IP reputation, the responsibility of keeping the mailing lists healthy falls in the marketers’ scope of work. Stale ids need to be weeded out from the lists on a continual basis in order to maintain clean and fresh lists which respond well to your painstakingly well-crafted marketing mailers. A cleaner list will give you better Open and Click rates. Also, you now stand a better chance at sending outcome-based campaigns based on your prospect’s responses to your previous campaigns – leading to better conversions. Now aren’t you going to love that?
A simple list hygiene check-up should take the following steps into consideration:
- Monitor bounce rates and spam rates on a regular basis.
- Identifying the inactive ids.
- Eliminating detected inactive ids from your lists.
So dear fellow marketers – keep scrubbing ;)
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