Having a highly engaged and healthy email list should be the number one priority for an email marketer. In order to get a higher rate of customer engagement, there are many factors to keep in mind. An email list shouldn’t be overburdened with active addresses as it would deliberately lower your engagement rate.
With the increase of email marketing, the spread of various scams hiked and thus is terminating the access to people for valuable content. Various steps should be taken in order to have a successful email marketing campaign with accurate and entrusted data. The most important factor to have clean engagement metrics is email hygiene.
What is Email Hygiene? What are its benefits?
It refers to the decontamination of invalid email addresses from one’s email list, such as the removal of invalid uninterested email addresses and providing only useful messages. It includes a number of practices that the email marketer should follow in order to make the list valid and efficient.
Email hygiene practices an email marketer should follow
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- The email marketer should obtain the list from credible sources and ensure that it is from a reputed data provider.
- Removal of inactive email subscribers also cleans up the clogging. Email hygiene also helps in improving the ROI which is excellent.
- Avoiding the spam folders and segmenting the email list. Inserting a clear unsubscribe link or button along with offering a preference center would also let the customers get relative content.
- Personalization techniques would also help in building relationships with the subscribers of the email list.
- A lot of spam traps are out there and it would filter out the inactive mailboxes.
- Email hygiene removes repetitive ‘soft’ bounces. Soft bounces aren’t that harmful but it would still be more efficient if they were removed.
Why email hygiene?
- It is one of the most critical and accurate components in order to have a clean list and high deliverability.
- It helps the marketer to maintain a good sender reputation which would also make him/her a credible service provider as the email list won’t be inactive or have spam reports.
- It also saves a lot of money as owning an email database is really expensive especially if the emails keep clogging up and reducing the quality of your content.
- It also helps in lowering the bounce rates in order to easily reach the email campaign’s target. A high bounce rate leads to inversely affecting your inbox delivery rate.
What to do when your email campaign has been affected by bad practices?
If the email marketer comes across the information that his content has been affected by various unhealthy practices, he/she should check where they stand in terms of sender reputation and whether they are on any blacklists.
Repairing the sender’s reputation can be helped by using Google Postmaster and Microsoft SNDS. When it comes to knowing whether or not the center is on the blacklist, tools like MXtoolbox can be used.
However, there are various email hygiene services that can ensure that your email marketing campaign goes smoothly and help in gaining the trust of the target audience.
Make sure you have got a healthy and efficient email list.
