List Hygiene, aka How to Get Your Emails to the Inbox

Business Basics & Marketing Tips

Clean up my list? Can’t it wait?

I don’t want to delete THAT many contacts! 

We hate to break it to you, but if you want to keep your Sender Reputation in good standing with email providers and get your emails into your prospect’s inbox, you MUST engage in a regular process to identify contacts who are no longer engaging and remove them from your database.

Getting emails into the inbox of your database subscribers is a complex process with many players and moving parts. However, the player with the greatest potential impact on your email deliverability – both positive and negative – is you.

All business owners, and marketers, should bear in mind the following realities regarding email marketing:

  • The rules for email marketing have changed considerably in the past 5 years and continue to do so. It is not an overstatement to say that it gets harder every day to land in your prospect’s inbox.
  • Email providers – the Gmails, Yahoos, AOLs, etc. – have all tightened their filters in an effort to provide their customers with “the most enjoyable experience with a high level of perceived security.”
  • **You/your business are NOT the email provider’s customer!  Their customers are your prospects/email recipients. Email providers see themselves in the role of protecting their customers from potentially unscrupulous marketers. They have no interest in your success. Their interest is ONLY what their customers indicate they want to see based on the customer’s behavior, specifically, opens and clicks.
  • Each email provider utilizes complex algorithms that assign your sender domain a “score.” It’s like a credit score; only you don’t have access to it nor to what went into it, but it has a significant impact on your business.
  • It’s essential to send to your database regularly – once a week or more. If you send only occasionally because you don’t want to “bother” your audience, you’ll generate too little data on your domain, and like a credit score, if there’s very little or no data, that’s considered a negative.
  • Every single unopened email puts a ding in your sender reputation. Every single one.
  • Like a credit score, your sender reputation can drop very quickly but will rebuild slowly.
  • A list cleanse removes non-responsive (non-engaged) contacts, so you don’t continue to email them. This is one of the most important ways you can plus your sender reputation because the algorithm not only tracks individual activity relative to your domain but also tracks your collective activity for all customers that you send to. A high percentage of engagers within any email provider boosts your reputation for that provider.

To build your sender reputation and a responsive list, you should:

  1. Mail only to engaged contacts
  2. Mail frequently, weekly or more is best but not less than every other week
  3. Focus on content that is solution oriented and easy to access

Our go-to resource for all things related to getting emails into the inbox is EmailSmart.com, co-founded by two of the nicest and smartest guys you will ever meet, Adrian Savage and Evin Samarin. Additionally, our team member and Keap Certified Partner, Cami Shieff, is a certified EmailSmart consultant. If we need to dive deeper into your deliverability, Cami is our go-to gal.

The following are our minimum criteria for list hygiene:

**Ask your account manager about recommended adjustments based on your specific needs.

  • Perform a list hygiene sweep of your contact database monthly or purchase Defender from EmailSmart, which automates a daily sweep.
  • From the data derived from the sweep, send all contacts who have not engaged in 6 months or longer into a 2 to 3 email “Get Back” campaign.
  • Contacts who engage with the Get Back campaign remain on the mailable list; those who do not are scheduled for export# and deletion* from your database.
  • *Customers, defined as contacts who’ve paid you any amount of money at any time, are never removed from your database.
  • #Export and save 2 lists prior to deleting the contacts:
    Export 1 – all opt-outs, spam complainers, spam traps, and other non-mailable email addresses
    Export 2 – all mailable but unengaged for 6 months or longer after the Get Back campaign is complete
  • Once you have the exported files, your ads team can utilize these lists to create custom audiences for your social media advertising