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In email marketing, your list is your life.
Without an email list, you have no one to send emails to; you wouldn’t have an audience to market yourself or your products.
Which is why your email marketing strategy should include good list hygiene practices.
List hygiene is really all about who you should send emails to, and who you shouldn’t.
In other words, it’s primarily built around a good segmentation strategy, so that you can send the right emails to the right people at the right time.
Good Segmentation Habits
Whenever you send an email, your aim should be to maximize deliverability and engagement.
Your email deliverability is characterized by 3 main metrics:
- bounce rate: how often your emails aren’t delivered due to server issues or a full inbox
- fail to deliver rate: how often your emails aren’t delivered because the email address is permanently unavailable
- spam rate: how often your emails get spam reported
Your email engagement is characterized by 2 main metrics:
- open rate: how many of your sent emails are opened
- click through rate: how many of your opened emails are clicked
Although open rates from Apple devices are now inaccurate due to their Mail Privacy Protection, keeping track of any sudden changes in your OR can help you gauge your engagement.
Segment Exclusions
With this in mind, these are the segments that you should exclude whenever you broadcast an email:
- Anybody who has bounced an email 3 or more times
- Anybody who has failed to receive your emails 2 or more times
- Anybody who has reported your emails as spam
High bounce rates, fail to deliver rates and spam rates are a sign that you’re blindly emailing your list without monitoring your email deliverability metrics.
The higher these numbers are, the more likely your future emails will end up in spam.
Engaged Segment
Your engaged segment is the group of people on your email list who recently open or click your emails.
It should be one of the fundamental segments in your email strategy, because the size of your engaged segment indicates the quality of your email messages.
For example: if you have a list of 10000 people, and your engaged segment is only 100 people, this means your emails suck!
By using the engaged segment in your broadcasts you avoid sending it to your unengaged subscribers.
This helps maintain your email deliverability because subscribers who don’t open or click your emails will only lower your engagement rate.
In general, a low engagement rate is correlated to high spam reports and unsubscribe rates!
Re-Engagement
Re-engaging members of your list is also a big part of list cleaning and is also cost effective; it costs more money to obtain a new subscriber than it is to retain an old one.
Since your core emails are sent to your engaged segments, you should spend some effort winning back your unengaged segment.
To do this, send them a targeted email-only offer based on some of their past website behaviours, such as:
- add to carts
- product page views
- order history.
For example:
Build a segment for people who have not opened or clicked any of your emails in the past 60 days, and have ever added product A to their shopping cart, but did not complete checkout.
You can re-engage them by sending a limited time offer for product A to this segment through email.
Winning back your unengaged subscribers is difficult since the engagement for this segment is already very low, but some win back conversions are better than none at all.
For those that still don’t convert, it’s worth sending an automated email survey to better understand why they’ve lost touch with you, so that you can get some valuable feedback.
Sunsetting
Those that cannot be re-engaged should be added to a dedicated list of subscribers who are excluded from all future emails, except Black Friday, clearance sales, closing sales, or other large promotions.
Sending them more emails will only continue to hurt your deliverability and engagement.
Because most people only shop during large promotions, keeping a sunset list will give you the ability to reach out to them when the time is right.
List Purging
Email service providers typically bill you for the number of subscribers on your email list.
So if you have a large unengaged segment or sunset list, it may be necessary for you to delete some of them.
Otherwise you’d be paying a lot of money for unused subscribers.
Conclusion
You can practice good list hygiene through careful segmentation, winning back or sunsetting unengaged subscribers, and purging your list from time to time.
Doing so will help you get more engagement and sales from your emails, while also preventing them from getting spammed.
Alternatively, you can resell our white-label email marketing services so that you can focus on acquiring and managing clients!
Further reading:
What is segmentation?
Benefits of segmentation in email marketing
Email campaigns