Improving ROI with Email Hygiene
What determines email marketing success?
There are many factors that determine the success of your email marketing campaign. You must get the right people to sign up. You need to provide engaging content. Your copy must catch the attention and appeal to your audience. You must segment your list so that your efforts are targeted. You must do all of these things consistently because conversion doesn’t happen overnight.
There’s an even more important factor from which everything hinges: a clean email list. It doesn’t matter how many of your customers subscribe, how good your content and copy are, or how efficiently targeted your list is. If your list is riddled with bad and invalid email addresses, your email marketing efforts will be negatively affected and your subscribers will not receive your email communication.
How does email hygiene improve conversion rates?
Your email list forms the foundation of your email marketing. And no, it’s not about merely building a long subscriber list. Sure, you want to reach as many of your customers as possible. But you want a good quality list with well-targeted subscribers.
Your email list hygiene affects your online reputation. Your online reputation, in turn, affects email deliverability.
ISPs (internet service providers) look closely at your online reputation. ISPs are wary of spammers and will protect their customers from unwanted mail. If they deem your reputation suspicious or dubious, they are likely to block communication coming from you.
To ascertain your reputation, ISPs look into your bounce rate. That is, how many times your emails bounce back or are returned to you. If you have a relatively high bounce rate, they will consider you a spammer and limit, if not ban altogether, communication from you.
How do I ensure email hygiene?
Frequent email data scrubbing is key to email list hygiene. You need to look out for the following types of email addresses:
1. Fake addresses. These addresses don’t exist and will increase your bounce rates.
2. Spam traps. These addresses are essentially bait, used by ISPs to identify spammers.
3. Addresses with typographical and syntax errors. The most common typographical errors can be corrected by some email cleaning software, such as ListWise.
4. Role-based or department accounts. These are accounts that usually begin with sales@, webmaster@, info@ or something similar. They are not personal email addresses. They were created to receive specific types of mail and sometimes go to multiple people.
All of these addresses can be flagged, corrected or removed by email scrubbing software, such as ListWise. Make sure that you include email list cleaning as part of your email marketing strategy.