Introduction

Email list cleaning is one of the most useful practices for effective marketing in 2022. If done properly, businesses can really acquire customers with email marketing. In 2020, almost 40 per cent business owners and users felt an increase in the effectiveness of email marketing. The importance of email list cleaning and its basics cannot be ignored.

The most important thing is working on the basics of email list cleaning. Email lists need to be managed properly for the best results. Rather than getting a list of thousands of leads – most of which might not convert – you need quality leads with better chances of conversion. Getting the contacts of users that might be interested is more essential.

You can also outsource email list cleaning services to experts for high quality email lists sorted by experienced professionals. Let us look at some of the most useful email list cleaning techniques to ensure high chances of conversion.

1. Create Extensive Forms

Creating extensive forms on your websites helps you get information about interested users. Asking about specific information helps you find out whether the people who have signed up for your newsletters and subscribed to your emails are really interested in your products, services, content, and promotions or not.

Creating healthy email lists is one of the most important aspects of email list cleaning, which many companies miss out on. Working on the basics and getting quality fresh leads is as important as working on previously accumulated leads. Your forms can include several questions about the user’s preferences, personal information, and opinions.

The best email list cleaning service providers usually work in this way and help you gather fresh emailing contacts from other sources besides your own website. They also help you in form creation and help you utilize these forms in the best way possible.

2. Segment Your Mailing Lists

Segmenting your email lists is really important in today’s day and age of data overload. Segment your email lists on the basis of various parameters such as interests, location, purchase history, etc. Such segmentation really helps you target different users differently to get the desired results by emailing people the stuff they are most interested in.

For example, if you own a travel agency and are looking to advertise a tour package to Australia, you can target users that love traveling on Christmas, especially those belonging to northern hemisphere countries. The best email list cleaning service providers help you segregate your email lists using several parameters, which you can also use to find and filter out your database.

Categorization and indexing is also one of the most important aspects of cleaning up email lists. It also helps you easily remove the contacts you no longer need, by easily finding them and filtering them out.

3. Watch Your Email Content

Keep your email subject line crisp and clear. Don’t write misleading words and phrases like ‘urgent’ and ‘this is serious’ as users can mistake it for something really important and be disappointed by the end result. Keep your email subject catchy, but logical at the same time. While this technique might not come across as a direct way of cleaning up email lists, it can really reduce your bounce rates and increase your conversions.

Avoid using spammy content in your email body. Do not add too many links that lead your email readers to anything besides your website. Be clear in your communication, and directly talk about your products and services in your email content. Being creative is always helpful and helps keep your readers hooked, but miscommunicating messages can always backfire.

You can also outsource mailing list cleanup services to experts to help you create effective email content for better marketing management.

4. Test Email Addresses for Deliverability

Testing email addresses for deliverability really helps you increase your email marketing conversion rates. Take out bounced addresses – that is email id’s that don’t respond to your emails or carry out any further course of action with regards to your company or website. Email testing is one of the most important mailing list cleanup services.

To carry out this activity yourself, pick a sample list of fifty to hundred email ids that might or might not be interested in your products or services. After sending out a common set of emails to all these contacts, wait for a few days and check the user’s response. Also, email the same content to id’s of your own friends and relatives to check the folder in which your emails end up.

If users respond to your emails directly or by interacting with your company or website, and if your emails are ending up in the primary (or promotions) inbox rather than the spam folder, your sample email lists are good to go and you should choose other similar lists for better email marketing in the future. If not, check where you are going wrong. You can also outsource email list cleaning services to experts for best results.

5. Add a Double Opt-In

Adding double opt-ins also helps you a lot with your email list cleaning. Adding two-step email confirmation or two-step SMS verification helps you identify genuine users from bots and other users that might not fit your bill. Users that are really interested are the ones that actually make the effort to fill up your forms and then check their messages or emails to verify their interest in your products and services.

You can add double opt-ins for a variety of things on your websites and emails. For example, any user that registers to your website, subscribes to your email lists, buys any premium membership, or tries to change their password should be verified with the help of double opt-in procedures.

Get expert developers to create the appropriate software and test it rigorously before you can implement it or integrate it with your website. You can also discuss this and other technical needs with email list cleaning service experts.

6. Correct Typing Errors

This might sound as a very basic email list cleaning technique, but is actually very useful. As with most things in life, the most basic of things are usually quite integral to solving complex problems and countering difficult situations. Simple typing errors can cause great confusion. People and companies that usually have large emailing lists don’t worry about one or two bad entries, but each bad entry can affect your email marketing badly.

For example, let’s consider you have a list of approximately thousand email ids, out of which fifty have typing errors. If 19 users actually go on to buy your premium membership – the conversion percentage according to you would be 1.9%, while it is actually 2% (19 is 2% of 950). Not being clear with your numbers is actually a bad sign, and should be avoided at all costs for running businesses successfully.

Also remember that every email id has a logic and includes information such as the user’s date of birth, year of birth, interests, zodiac sign, and favorite personality besides many other things. Some email ids might have been genuinely misspelled by the users themselves while registering, while some might be intentionally misspelled to get a unique identity.

The best email list cleaning service providers help you eliminate email ids with typing errors to create healthy lists for your marketing purposes.

7. Remove Inactive Users and Duplicate Entries

Removing duplicate entries is as important as removing entries with typing errors, for the same reasons as described above. This helps in the process of cleaning up email lists and can save a lot of your business time and also helps avoid miscalculation of entries. Removing inactive users is important for the same reason as well as other reasons, such as your emails moving from the ‘important’ to ‘unimportant’ category for all users.

If a substantial bit of your emails are ending up in the inboxes of users that are just not active, the email algorithm might find your content as unimportant, which might lead to your emails ending up in the ‘unimportant’ category even for users to whom your emails might be important. Such users might miss out on your important emails, which can affect your business negatively in the long run.

8. Regularly Inspect, Verify and Update the Lists

A great way to regularly inspect, verify and update email lists is by testing small sample sizes. Cleaning up email lists is impossible without regularly removing useless information, and hence proper updation is key. It is not always easy to manage huge emailing lists on your own, and you might require expert help and assistance to overcome capacity issues.

Outsourcing your inspection and updation requirements to mailing list cleanup service providers can be a great idea. Such service providers not only handle large amounts of email entries, but also have their own ways to inspect and verify emailing lists. Using their own processes, they update your email lists to ensure maximum conversion.

9. Maintain Your Website Security

Maintaining a good quality website is really important for effective email marketing. All aspects of your website need to be quality-tested – be it the UI/UX, content, functionality, or security. Adding a SSL certificate if necessary. Check your domain id and hosting for verifying your website’s traffic-handling capability.

A bad website can impact your sales, and also increase the bounce rates of your emails. Once users read your emails, the most disappointing thing would be if they bounce away only after visiting your website. Make sure that your website – which is the ultimate resource and address to present all your desired information and data – is in good shape. Good mailing list cleanup service providers will help you provide website consultants to increase your email conversion rates.

10. Don’t Buy Third-Party Lists

Third-party lists don’t really help email list cleaning. Instead, they can lead to email list cluttering in most cases. Buying email lists from third-party companies does not really help your cause as the ids included in those lists might not really work for you. Such companies won’t filter qualifiable leads for you, so it is important to not just sign up to third-party companies that advertise themselves as possessors of 101% quality leads.

You should rather work with a group of experts or an organization that offers genuine email list cleaning services. Such experts usually manage your pre-existing contacts and optimize the resources you already have along with getting fresh contacts for your business.

Conclusion

Email list cleaning can be tedious, especially if you have acquired a long list of contacts after years of business. However, cleaning lists is really important and must be carried out in the most appropriate way. Check out this evergreen checklist of email marketing strategies to ensure a guaranteed jump in your conversion rates.

SunTec Data is the best email list cleaning service provider that assures reduced bounce rates, reduced marketing costs, and higher conversion rates. SunTec Data promises 100% data security and low turnaround time at customized packages according to your needs. Get a free quote by emailing all your requirements to info@suntecdata.com.