Spring cleaning isn’t just for closets. Your email list could probably use a purge, too. If your email opens are down, we recommend taking a hard look at your email marketing database and removing or re-engaging subscribers. Read on for the how and why of spring cleaning your email list.
Why You Need to Clean Your Email List
How old is the oldest email address in your email database? How engaged is your email database, overall? Look at your open and click-through rates over time. If they have started to decline, you might be hurting your email deliverability. Many email service providers look at your email engagement as an indicator of the health of your email list. They use this to determine if your subscribers really want to be on your list, if they are still interested in you. Sustained low email engagement can actually cause lower performance in the future as the ESPs may throttle or limit delivery.
Who to Remove From Your Email List
Take a look at your last few email campaigns. Who is opening them? Who is clicking? If someone hasn’t engaged with you recently, try suppressing them from sends or moving them to another part of your email list for awhile. What “recently” means can vary based on how frequently you send, but 90-180 days is probably a good time range. Be sure to test what’s right for your list by keeping a close eye on all performance metrics.
How to Re-Engage Unsubscribers or Inactive Subscribers
While it’s tempting to target inactive subscribers with more emails and higher incentives, this is the last thing you should do. Inactive users are ignoring your emails, and unsubscribers can’t receive emails from you anymore anyway. The key is to retarget both groups outside of the inbox.
A winback campaign will take that list of unsubscribers or unengaged subscribers and match them on websites they frequent. Using encrypted, hashed data we can safely and securely target them with ads that don’t violate any privacy laws or harm your email engagement efforts. It’s a win-win!
Ready to get started? We offer a free evaluation to help customize your email marketing and advertising plan.