Why you need to keep your email lists clean.

In the email marketing world, your sending reputation is something that you need to protect with everything that you have (click here to watch a video we did on this topic).

One of the ways that you can help to look after it, is to keep your audience clean (this applies for all email marketing platforms).

So let me ask you a question. When was the last time that you cleaned out your list? If the answer is never, not in a very long time, I didn’t realise I had to, or how an earth do I do that, then you’re likely wasting time, effort, and money on marketing to people who aren’t interested in your business.

Cleaning your list (sometimes also referred to as Scrubbing) means removing anyone that is not actively engaged with you.

The benefits to doing this include:

• Better open and click rates – the more people who are opening and engaging with your content gives you a massive boost for your sending reputation
• Fewer spam complaints – face it, some people cannot remember how they signed up or when and as a result mark you as spam. The problem with this is that mailbox providers like Gmail log spam complaints. If there are too many, your emails go straight to the spam folder which means completely missing your inbox. The even bigger problem is, they’ll do it for everyone you send email to, not just the people that reported you.
• Reduced cost – you pay for the number of people subscribed to your list. Keep these numbers down and the monthly cost to you will also stay down.

You are much better to have a list of 500 actively engaged subscribers, then a list of 5000 with poor engagement.

Yep, we said it.

So make sure you set it as a part of your systems to be actively cleaning out your lists. If possible, create an automation within your CRM that does this for you!

I personally take a really hard line on this. For example, I’m tracking people’s last engagement dates. If your engagement date is more than 6 months old, then an automation kicks in and you are removed from my list. No if’s or butts.

For those of you who are delivering programs via email, just be wary that when you unsubscribe someone (or they do it themselves), that also removes your ability to send them the program. If you need to talk about a way around this, make sure you get in touch.

To watch a video on how to do this in Mailchimp, click here.

To steal my ActiveCampaign automation that does this for me, send me a message here!