Top Strategies for Mailing List Cleaning

In today’s digital era, email marketing has the potential to make or break a business. 64.1% of small businesses use email as a primary marketing channel. There are instances where email marketing has returned $36 in profit for every $1 of marketing expense. And, its relevance continues to benefit businesses.  

But, sending an email with highly engaging content is worthless if the audience finds it irrelevant. 

To pitch to the right audience, practice these best six mailing list cleaning strategies. These strategies act as a technology-enabled bridge between consumers and sellers. Therefore, they are likely to help you get better results from your email marketing campaigns.

What Do You Understand By Email List Scrubbing?

Email list scrubbing is an effective process to clean the email database by excluding incorrect, duplicate and not in use email addresses from the system.  Email list scrubbing is a standard practice that businesses use to keep consistent records of new and active consumers/prospects who are interested in their services or products.

Effectiveness of Email List Scrubbing

The email list scrubbing process eliminates irrelevant entries from your mailing list. By following this practice regularly, you can eradicate the chances of your marketing emails getting marked as spam. By having a healthy mailing list, you can also minimize the bounce rate significantly.

However, you must not focus only on deleting inactive clients, but also check how the customer responds after receiving your email. It is appreciated if an order is placed or some account, service, or product-related information is asked. On the contrary, inactive clients (with little to none open rate or click-through rate data) should be deleted from the database without further delay.

By cleaning the mail list regularly, you save time, energy, and money. This practice minimizes the chance of spamming. A mailer goes straight into the interested person’s inbox, thus letting you do some serious business.

However, it takes a lot of time to complete the mailing list cleaning process for a huge database, and a lot of money also goes in.

The email list scrubbing is a tedious task as the entire database needs to be checked for erasing irrelevant entries. A lot of tools and resources are also required to clean the system. Rather than deploying your team in this time taking process, it is ideal to outsource the email list scrubbing at timely intervals.

Industry-Wise Mailer Open Rate

Six Simple Strategies for Effective Mailing List Cleaning

1. Address Bounce Issue

The mail bounce issue occurs when the recipient’s mail server does not accept the email you sent. There are two types of bounce issues. One is soft bounce, and the other is hard bounce. 

Soft bounce mainly happens if the recipient’s server is busy or is temporarily out of service. Also, soft bounce is encountered if the email is too large or the receiver’s inbox is overloaded. 

In such cases, the sender receives an error message, “This email can be delivered successfully if sent again”.  

A hard bounce happens if the email delivery fails because of an invalid email address. The issue also occurs if the recipient’s server restricts the email.

Solution to stop soft bounce: Find the problems and address them. 

Solution to stop hard bounce: Verify the invalid email addresses and update or delete them from the database. 

2. Say No To Purchasing Mailing Lists

Professionals at DataEntryIndia.in ( an experienced email scrubbing service company) suggest you to not purchase databases for email marketing purposes. Since most such lists have non-verified data, they can badly hurt your marketing campaigns instead of  creating an effective impression for your brand. 

The use of purchased email lists can lead to higher spamming. As a sender, you are at risk of dropping a lucrative email in the inbox of an irrelevant consumer, thus, allowing the receiver to mark your email as spam.

3. Customize Your Mailing Lists

Customized mail lists are an assurance of connecting with the relevant audiences. Many business owners do not consider this process until they find zero user engagement on their mailers.

The minimal response from the target audience is likely because of two reasons. 

• Irrelevant Engagement Offering
• Irrelevant Content or Pitch

Irrelevant engagement refers to receiving emailers for products or services that do not match the expectation of the intended recipient. For example, if you send the price list of Product A to a customer who filled your form to ask about the custom features of Product A, your engagement targets are wrong and you will likely lose the prospect.  

Irrelevant content refers to only one-sided communication by the sender. Here, you are offering information but aren’t giving the customer a way to react or take action.  For example, an email talking about a unique product feature may entice the reader but the absence of questionnaires and links to visit the website can allow users to ignore you. Not asking for consumers’ choice and feeding them only about what your business offers is also not appreciated by consumers. 

Hence, connect with the appropriate audiences to know their preferences. It will help you to cater better to the customers and expand your business.

Customer preference is important to strengthen your business as email is widely used. Have a look at statistics that shows people’s activity on mail.

Statistics Showing Importance Of Email in People’s Everyday Life

• In 2020, the number of email users went up to 4 billion globally.

• Email is the most preferred way of communication for 62% of people. 

4. Renovate Campaign for Absent Clients

In business, clients are the success curators, hence you must try to connect with them to figure out their requirements.

It’s always a good idea to re-pitch to the audience who went inactive for a long time.  Firstly, drop an email saying, “You Were Missed”. It is human nature to respond when someone makes them feel valuable. This approach is most likely to receive a positive reply from consumers. As a greeting from sellers is something not many people expect.

If this point works, then stay in touch and offer products/services as per clients’ requirements.

Another way to pitch to an inactive consumer is to email some lucrative deals, such as a flat 30% discount on your next order, free shipping on orders above 2000, etc. If the user feels like availing such perks, then you will get a renewed sales opportunity. . 

Otherwise, move such recipients into the inactive list.

Here is an example, of the same:

5. Use Properly Formatted Email Address

Quite often, the senders of bulk mails have a very formal email id. It includes the designation or the company name. The sending of similar emails to multiple recipients increases the chance of spam. 

An ideal clean mailing list should exclude role accounts. For example, 

• Support@
• Admin@
• Sales@
• Info@
• Noreply@

Besides, the actual sender behind the moniker may change. Not every reader is interested in obliging an email from a generic sender but they open the email if it comes from a specific person. Lastly, the blacklist operator monitors such email ids to report the spammer. 

At the same time, customers’ email addresses should also be verified to omit typo errors. A list of typos that should be cleared from the mail list are

• Spelling mistake (abc@gmil.com instead of abc@gmail.com)
• Use of comma (,)
• Use of semicolon (;)
• Dual Periods (..) instead of one period (.)
• Missing period (.)

6. Double Opt – Email Subscription

Double Opt is the email subscription process that lets your customers acknowledge if they wish to be on your mailing list or not. When you send a mail to clients, there is a Call To Action (CTA) button which says something like,

“Yes. Subscribe Me To This List ” or “Verify My Email Address”

Once the user clicks on the given CTA, you get the clarity of having that person on board. Also, you can eliminate non-working email addresses by following the Double-Opt strategy and lower the bounce-back rate.

Here is an example of the same. 

Wrapping Up

This guide on six simple strategies for email list scrubbing will help you in mail list cleaning. In case you want enterprise-grade, high-quality email list cleaning services at budget-friendly prices, the DataEntryIndia.in team can help. To avail of our email scrubbing services, fill out the form on the https://www.dataentryindia.in/contact.html page or give us a call. We will be happy to assist you. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Which is the ideal time for mail list cleaning?

The golden rule is to clean the mail list in every ending quarter, that is, thrice a year. Or, you can do it every six months. It is up to you when to perform this action. But, never keep the task pending for a year or more. 

Q: Is there any benefit of cleaning mail lists?

Yes. There are multiple advantages of mail list cleansing. Some of them include:

• Enhances Delivery Rate
• DRelevant User Targeting
• Reduces Spam Ratio
• Maintains your Brand Reputation

Q: What are the steps for email scrubbing?

• Divide your consumers into groups. Active and Non-active.
• Delete wrong and non-working email addresses 
• Realign the campaign for your absent users
• Filter consumers who do not take action on redesigned campaign

Q: Is it ok to delete bounced emails?

Absolutely. You will have a diminished bounce rate by deleting emails that remained undelivered due to a permanent reason. The email remains undelivered if in case the users block you or the email addresses were not used or were invalid. 

Q: Where can I find undelivered emails?

The sender receives such emails with NDR (Non-delivery Report)  and it automatically gets deleted.