A sender’s reputation comprises a majority of an email marketer’s campaign success. It determines whether the internet and email service providers should send your campaign straight to their clients’ inboxes or not.
To maintain a good sender’s reputation, you must keep your engagement rates high as well. One way to do it is to maintain a clean email list and keep it free of inactive subscribers and bad email addresses. This practice is called email hygiene.
There are plenty of ways to keep your mailing list clean. Keep on reading to find out what these strategies are.
Contents
1. Exclude inactive subscribers from your future campaigns
The more inactive users you have in your mailing list that don’t open or react to your emails, the sooner your engagement rates drop. And when your engagement rates drop to unhealthy levels, your future campaigns are more prone to have poor deliverability rates.
If you’ve noticed that some users have been inactive for a month or two, move them into a different list segmentation and target them for re-engagement campaigns. Don’t include them in your list for the next campaigns.
2. Give uninterested subscribers the option to unsubscribe
One way to clean your mailing list is to send the inactive subscribers emails about the option to unsubscribe. They may have found your content to no longer reflect their interests and needs. It’s also good to offer an unsubscribe option because you can prevent uninterested users from reporting your campaigns as spam.
Getting your emails reported as spam is a big problem. It ruins your sender’s reputation and causes your future campaigns to have bad deliverability rates. If you receive more spam complaints, your IP address and marketing account could be blacklisted from sending emails.
3. Personalize your emails to avoid the spam filter
Spam filters don’t just pay attention to subject lines. They also scan the contents of your email, especially the greetings. If you use a generic template where the greeting is only “Good Day!” and doesn’t mention any name, your campaigns have a high chance of not making it to your recipients’ inboxes.
Automate your campaign composition tool to personalize email campaigns by reading the names or usernames of your subscribers. And set the greetings to match the identity information provided by your users. This will make the spam filters of your recipients treat your emails as a high priority because you’re addressing the recipients personally.
4. Consider running a re-engagement campaign
Let’s go back to the idea from #1. Uninterested users have different reasons for being inactive. It can be because your content no longer matches their needs or they’re no longer using their registered email accounts. Don’t go straight away deleting them from your list because of that.
It’s hard to earn new subscribers so you must re-engage them first. Common and effective strategies involve sending offers, discounts, vouchers, coupons, or freebies. Do that and see if they react to your campaigns. If they do, monitor their engagement.
What items or links did they click or let their mouse arrow hover on? When did they read your re-engagement campaign? Then, record their engagement. Doing so can help you determine when is the best time to send emails and which campaigns you should send them in the future to keep them from being active users.
5. Remove subscribers who have inactive for long
If your re-engagement campaigns yield no effect and the inactive users have remained cold for more than two months, it’s time to permanently delete them from your mailing list. As hard as it is to let go and earn new subscribers in digital marketing, removing users who have been inactive for long is a necessary move to keep your sender’s reputation high.
6. Set up a two-factor authentication
It’s good to keep the sign-up process for your mailing list simple to quickly grow your mailing list. However, doing so easily invites bots and spam traps to your mailing list. These bad emails are mostly the cause of inactive users in every email marketer’s mailing list.
Setting up a two-factor authentication system for your mailing list is a huge help to filter out bad emails. This is because most bots and spam traps aren’t designed to open up a confirmation email and click the link provided in it.
7. Avoid purchased lists
Another way to keep bots, spam traps, and inactive emails out of your mailing list is to never buy email lists. Even if the entity selling the list confidently claims that their list is free of bots and traps, you could still receive a damaging blow to your sender’s reputation.
Why is this? Because if you send campaigns to users without their consent or are completely unaware of your business, you will receive massive unsubscriptions and spam reports. The worst-case scenario which is getting automatically blacklisted from sending campaigns is also common.
The best way to grow your mailing list is the safe way. That means writing a good sign-up call-to-action at every end of your business’s web content.
Make Email Hygiene a Regular Habit
Don’t just follow the tips you’ve found above once. Practice good email hygiene by checking your mailing lists for inactive subscribers and bad emails once a month or once every two months. Remember, the cleaner your mailing list is, the more leads you can convert and the more sales you achieve.
