Email continues to be one of the most effective ways to reach a large audience instantly. However, maintaining an email list can feel like a thankless job, due to the sheer amount of time it takes to sort through and process data. To help you out, we’ve put together a list of email list management best practices.
Make it a regular practice
Clean lists = better performing lists. Optimally, cleaning your organization’s list will take place once a month — but once a quarter or once a year is fine too! Recognizing that this can take considerable time, our next recommendation is…
Decide if you want to keep email list maintenance in-house or outsource
There are a number of services that can clean your list for you and also verify email addresses, identify potential spam emails, and more. If you have the budget for it, awesome! If you don’t, that’s okay too! Most email marketing platforms allow you to download your entire subscriber list as a spreadsheet, which makes it much easier to review and sort through the raw data of your mailing list. If you keep it in-house, get comfortable using the deduping and sorting tools!
Set your benchmarks
We love data and email analytics are no exception. Set your benchmarks so you can assess performance by tracking the following before you start cleaning your list:
- Average email open rate (how many people opened your email)
- Average click-through rate (how many people clicked on at least one link in your email)
- Email unsubscribe rate (how many people unsubscribed from your mailing list)
- Complaint rate (the number of emails reported as spam)
- Conversion rate (the number of people who took an action you wanted them to complete)
- Bounce rate (the number of emails that were not successful in reaching its end user)
define criteria for removal
It might feel counterintuitive to remove people from your mailing list — but it actually has the opposite effect. The people who remain are people who want to hear from you — which supports your email engagement efforts while decreasing the likelihood of your messages being marked as spam. Bonus: if your email marketing platform charges based on the number of contacts, this is a great way to stabilize your list to stay within the budgeted threshold.
Set parameters for who should be removed — such as length of inactivity (months? Years?), an outdated company address for someone who has moved on, etc. Then, sort your list by inactivity and use those parameters to remove people from the list. If this feels too drastic a move…
Send a re-engagement campaign
Set your criteria for who should receive the message and ask if they wish to stay on the mailing list. It could go to your entire email list or it could go to a population that meets a set parameter, such as no activity in the last six months. You can also invite them to adjust their email preferences if you’ve provided an opt-down feature. Before you hit send though, decide how long you’ll give people to respond to the re-engagement campaign before removing them from your list.
Check those duplicates.
First, dedupe the data to see if there are duplicate email addresses — sometimes you’ll find a typo or slightly different information that distinguishes the two addresses.
Next, sort by name to see if the same individual has multiple email addresses subscribed. Some people forget that they’re already subscribed to a mailing list. Others may have had their organization’s email domain changed and signed up using both addresses — for example, email.thesunnysidecreative.com versus thesunnysidecreative.com. Finally, see which email address has the higher engagement rate.
If one email address shows as consistently opening emails while another shows as no opens at all and you know both email addresses belong to the same person, it might be worth archiving the lesser performing one. Instant engagement boost!
If both emails are equally performing, consider reaching out to the individual and asking if they’d like for both email addresses to remain on the list. A quick request for updated information could lead to a conversation about volunteering, donating, or other engagement opportunities.
Search for typos
The most common typos that come up in email list maintenance are the misspelling of individual names and email domains: gmail, outlook, hotmail, .com, .org, etc. For example, someone might input gmial.com instead of gmail.com. Use the search and find feature in your spreadsheet to find common typos and replace them.
Dig through those soft and hard bounces
A soft bounce is temporarily undeliverable and can usually be resolved easily. Triggers for soft bounces include a subscriber with a full inbox, a downed email server, non-compliance with the recipient server’s anti-spam policies, etc. However, if an address soft bounces one too many times, then it will hard bounce.
A hard bounce happens when an email address no longer exists or is no longer accepting deliveries. In this case, your email marketing platform may immediately remove the address from your mailing list, while others may require you to remove them manually. Look at your bounced list data and see what email addresses can be removed or adjusted accordingly.
Reassess benchmarks
Give your list some time after the clean to see how it’s performing. If your numbers are increasing, that tells us your list is better performing and your content is performing well. If your numbers are flat or decreasing, it may be time to re-evaluate your email designs, content, and calls to action. But at least you know your list is clean!
We can talk about email design, email hygiene, and how they play a role in your larger marketing and fundraising strategy all day. If you want to pick our brain and see how we can support you, let’s talk!