Keeping A Clean List:A Beginner’s Guide to Email List Hygiene

As a business, building an email list is key for communication strategy and marketing.

While much of the focus is typically on collecting subscribers: “How quickly can we grow our list?” Businesses often neglect the other side of list-building — email list hygiene: “How can we make sure our list is clean?”

Poor email list hygiene practices have a tendency to snowball, catching businesses off guard and negatively impacting email marketing efforts by interfering with deliverability and keeping subscribers from receiving your emails.

If your business hasn’t paid attention to email list hygiene before, don’t worry. In this guide, you will learn:

• Who makes up a clean email list
• Why it’s important to care about list hygiene
• How to maintain a clean list for optimal subscriber engagement

After reading this, not only will your business have actionable steps to take, but you will become a champion of your subscribers and email program.

So who makes up a clean email list?

In order to answer this question, let’s get a little deeper by looking at a “clean subscriber profile.” All clean subscriber profiles have three properties in common:

1. Permission. A clean subscriber has explicitly given you permission to email them. This is also known as explicit consent or opt-in. Depending on where your business operates, there are strict rules and regulations for collecting consent (EU: GDPR, California, US: CCPA, US: CAN-SPAM, CAN: CASL). You’ll want to steer clear of purchased lists as they could leave damaging effects on your deliverability rates and engagement performance. Collecting explicit opt-in is the best method here.
2. A Unique Mailable Email Address. Be vigilant for spam sign-ups and typo errors.
3. No Suppression Red Flags. If a profile has elected to unsubscribe, marked your emails as spam, or bounced more than seven times, be sure to suppress them from your regular sending cadence.

With the definition of “clean subscriber profiles” in mind, let’s talk about the two reasons your business should prioritize building a list of these profiles only:

1. It provides your email program a steady foundation.
   Without a clean list, your business could run the risk of
   • Sending unsolicited emails
   • Triggering spam traps
   • Bouncing out of the inbox
   Individual Internet Service Providers (ISPs) monitor these risky activities, compound them over time and begin to take notice when they see an uptick. Red flags are set off to protect their users from any emails coming from a “spammy” domain. That means the ability to deliver to subscriber profiles that are considered “clean” (subscribers that gave you explicit permission to contact them) will also be “protected” from receiving your emails. And if you think about that, with no one receiving emails: How will it affect your business, and can it afford to play catch up?
2. It provides positive ROI.
   While total subscribers added and total list size are at the forefront of measuring email list success, these are just vanity metrics when building a list. Focus on obtaining quality sign-ups over quantity of sign-ups. This is the key to making a positive impact on your bottom line. Quality sign-ups will be worth much more to you in the long run and increase your engagement per user and revenue per user over time.

Now that you’re caught up on the importance of list hygiene for your business, let’s walk through the steps you can take to make sure you’re regularly keeping a clean list:

STEP 1: Do an audit of your subscriber sources.

• Do you have email collection on-site? Make sure to include a marketing consent box where necessary.

• If spam sign-ups is a concern, you can install real-time email verification software:

Try out Kickbox, NeverBounce, The Checker,

• After someone signs up, send an email confirming opt-in. A double opt-in is a sure bet that whoever signs up to your list wants to be there. It’s also a great way of keeping out spam sign-ups.

• If your main way of obtaining subscribers is through channel partnerships, holding sweepstakes and contests, or purchasing lists, provide a welcome email introducing your business and how you got their email. The main call to action should be like the above example, asking them to confirm their subscription. Because you are starting from ground zero with these groups, you’ll want to do all that you can to make a good impression. Asking for permission is a sign of respect and will lay the foundation to gain a user’s trust.

STEP 2: Do an audit of your current list.

• Do you have a suppression list? Make sure to clearly label your segment and include all addresses that qualify as unsubscribes, marked as spam and persistent bounces.
• Run your list through an email verification service to ensure your list is void of typos and non-mailable addresses. Some services to check out are: Kickbox, Neverbounce, ZeroBounce

STEP 3: Do these audits regularly.

• Consider purging your suppression list every six months.
• If you don’t have real-time verification set up, it’s a good idea to run your list through a verification service at least once a quarter.

At the end of the day, the most important thing is making sure the people on your list want to be there. Always put yourself in the shoes of the subscriber and approach each profile collected as a relationship. It goes back to the three clean subscriber profile traits mentioned at the beginning of this guide:

1. Permission: Does this person really want to hear from me?
2. A Unique Mailable Address: Do I have the right information to be contacting this person?
3. No Suppression Red Flags: Am I honoring this person’s contact preferences? Maybe they don’t want to hear from me.

By framing your list management strategy to align with this approach, not only will you become a champion of your subscriber list, your email program will flourish and see stand out results.

Author: Jennifer Lee

Jen is a lifelong #emailgeek in the retail, eCommerce, and direct-to-consumer space. Her mission is to help brands grow and scale through email marketing. The thing she loves most about what she does is the intersection of data and creativity; being able to leverage customer data and behavioral events to deliver a personal experience in the inbox. She recently built Nectar Sleep’s email lifecycle program from the ground up, growing their email channel to $75M total revenue in less than 3 years. Jen is onto her next gig and is bullish on helping other brands achieve the same growth as she did for Nectar!

Connect with Jen on Twitter if you want to chat about email marketing, business, or just life in general. :)

How can FlipRSS help you?

FlipRSS integrates with Mailchimp to automate multiple RSS feeds in email newsletters. Using advanced segmentation, FlipRSS enables your subscribers to select the content they wish to receive enabling the automated delivery of personalised content. FlipRSS clients are seeing big immediate increases in open rate, click-through-rate, and subscriber satisfaction.

Once set up, newsletters are created, customised and scheduled automatically. Sit back, watch your email stats outperform your competitors and focus on creating great content.

What sets us apart?

We’re a small team. Small enough to really care. We care about the quality of the product we produce, we care about the experience of every customer we have the privilege of working with and we care about our impact. We’re here to do a great job of supporting, delighting and connecting you and your subscribers.

We’ll help you get set up, so get in touch.

Try FlipRSS here (30 days free, no credit card required).