How to Keep Your Email List Healthy, According to Deliverability Experts

We are coming up fast on the holidays, but it is worth putting some time aside to ensure you are on the right track with your email marketing goals for 2023. A healthy email list is one of the most important aspects of any email marketing strategy.

A healthy email list ensures that you only send messages to people who want to receive them. This improves deliverability and reduces the risk of bounces and your emails being marked as spam. At the same time, it increases engagement metrics and means more people can interact with your email content.

But, maintaining an effective email list hygiene strategy can be a challenge. Here are some tips for implementing an effective email list hygiene strategy.

1) Regularly Monitor Your List

It’s essential to regularly monitor your email list for signs of inactive segments and monitor the results of campaigns for spikes in unsubscribes or complaints. If someone has not opened or engaged with emails from you in a while, it’s best to send them re-engagement emails to ensure they’re still interested in hearing from you.

2) Utilize Email Unsubscribe Links

This may seem obvious, but it is worth re-stating. Please don’t hide, minimize or obfuscate your unsubscribe links. We see far too many businesses still doing this in 2022. Make sure that all your emails contain easy-to-find unsubscribe links so that people can quickly and easily opt-out of receiving future emails from you if they no longer wish to do so. This will help reduce the number of people marking your emails as spam and ensure that those on your mailing list are interested in what you offer.

3) Segment Your List

Segmenting your mailing list allows you to create targeted messages for different groups within your audience based on their interests and preferences. This will help ensure that each message resonates with its intended audience, improving engagement and reducing the risk of being marked as spam by recipients who aren’t interested in your offer.

4) Use Automation Flows

Automation makes it easier to manage large lists by allowing you to set up automated processes such as moving inactive subscribers to automated re-engagement campaigns and automatically marking dormant subscribers.

5) Keep Bad Addresses Off Your List

Consider regularly running your inactive and dormant subscriber lists through a list hygiene service. Many of those addresses may now be abandoned or recycled traps and list hygiene services like Alfred can help identify them. However, better still is verifying an email address before adding it to your contact list; this can help increase your valid subscribers, alerting someone attempting to subscribe if they made a mistake entering their address. This is an unbeatable tool for maintaining low bounce rates and good relationships with mailbox providers.

6) Get Help If You Need it

Try Alfred, our email hygiene service, and we’ll give you 250 free credits. Or, if you suspect you’re having an email deliverability issue, our deliverability experts are happy to identify and correct minor problems before they become major ones.

By following these steps, you’ll be well on your way toward having an effective email hygiene process in place that will help keep both deliverability rates high and spam complaints low! So before you go off on your holidays, consider how you can protect your sender reputation in 2023 with simple to implement good list hygiene.