Almost every business has some kind of email list that they can use to put their products and services in front of the people that are interested in them, however there are a few scenarios where the business doing the advertising might not be getting what they had hoped for from their marketing efforts.
I’ll be going over the importance of keeping your contact lists clean and up to date, let’s look at some advantages of doing the clean-up and some repercussions that could be caused if not.
Get your emails in front of the people that want to see them
Possibly the biggest advantage of having a clean and up to date contact list is that it makes sure your advertising is going directly to the people who want to see it. Some businesses end up with huge email lists that they send their emails to. Maybe this is from being in business for many years or maybe they have acquired them by other means. However when you look at the email statistics of who is receiving, viewing or bouncing the emails that are being sent out that could show that only a very small proportion of the list is actually active users.
Let’s look at some stats to be considered:
Sent vs Delivered
This is one of the main stats to keep an eye on and could show some big improvements that could be made to your list. ‘Sent’ is the number of emails that have actually been sent, and ‘delivered’ are the amount of sent emails that reached the end user. Big differences in this can highlight some issues with your list. Next, let’s look at why people aren’t getting the emails you send out.
Reasons why emails weren’t delivered
The three main reasons why emails might not be delivered can fall into these three categories; blocked, soft bounce and hard bounce. The blocked email statistic usually represents an address that might have listed your email as spam or blacklisted your sending email so that they no longer receive material from your business. Soft bounces can be caused by a few different things, such as the recipient’s mailbox being full or a DNS failure.
Finally, the hard bounce. This often looks the most sinister of the three, however this is most commonly caused by someone typing in their email address incorrectly or a spam bot managing to find its way into your email list when there is no associated mailbox attached to the address.
Save yourself some money
When it comes to email sends there are a few different ways that you can pay for email marketing. If you look after it yourself, you are probably paying for email credits or some form of quota for the amount you can send. Simply cleaning your lists can dramatically decrease the amount of wasted revenue used to send emails. This is achieved by removing all of your bounced or spam emails that have found their way into your lists, this means your active users will stay the same but the amount of emails you are sending out will be much less.
When you cut down the amount of redundant sends your analytics look in much better shape as all of the emails that are getting sent are going to recipients that are active and much more interested in what your business has to offer. Over time this can save you a substantial amount of money and increase your ROI (Return on Investment).
Don’t get yourself on the wrong side of an ISP
Getting on the wrong side on an ISP is probably one of the worst outcomes from not keeping your email list nice and clean. It’s surprising how many emails are sent every single day and we have all experienced ones from companies that just won’t leave us alone. You’ve probably even marked an email as spam in the past, and that’s what you want to avoid happening to your business.
There is somewhat of a debate about the quota of how many emails are allowed to be marked as spam before you get blacklisted, but there is one good example we found: “If you send 10,000 emails at once and there’s a high bounce rate, you’ll get blacklisted when the rate goes above 10%.”
The key is to make sure that your bounce rate is as low as possible at all times so regularly removing these from your list would be an excellent idea. If you also gradually scale your sends overtime rather than start at the top this will make sure you don’t hit a high buncerate before you know they exist in your list.
Bonus: Make sure people want to be in and if not give them an easy way out
There are multiple ways to go about getting people to sign up to your email list. One of the most popular ways is to have a signup box on your website. When you have a signup box on your website, be sure to enable some form of double opt in.
We have seen many times in the past bots repeatedly sending variations of the same email through to people lists and if there isn’t any validation added in there all of the emails submitted will go directly to the companies email list causing huge amounts of emails to be undelivered.
When creating emails, including an unsubscribe link is a must! However, we have come across certain companies that don’t make it obvious how to unsubscribe. Allowing people to leave your list may sound counterintuitive at first, but if a subscriber is locked into receiving your emails they are inevitably going to mark them as spam and that’s the part that could reflect on your business negatively.
If you would like to know more about how we could help with your Email Marketing, contact us today for more information.
