Email marketing is very important to engage and to nurture your community and contacts. That is because you know email delivers better than any other channel. Therefore, a healthy email list is vital to any business because it is likely you will lose one third of your contacts every year through attrition. You may lose over a specific period of time through unsubscribes, hard bounces or undeliverable emails.

Internet service providers (ISPs), spam monitors, and email security services all set thresholds for what constitutes an acceptable email campaign. When your number of bounces, complaints and spam trap hits exceeds the threshold, your messages can be sent to the spam folder or even blocked. Let’s see what we can do to maintain the hygiene of the foundation of email marketing program – email list.

Email list will constantly change. You never know when you might see an important contact in the undeliverable list with a typo. So, review and investigate from the undelivered mail’s report. If there were misspellings or typos, try to correct it. Remove the emails if the status returned failed permanently, you know that those emails are no longer exist.

A number of times your subscribers can become inactive after registering a new account. It is a wise step to monitor and find out inactive list and win them back. Plan for one more win-back campaign to engage your inactive subscribers before removing them permanently like sending out a “We Miss You” or “We Want You Back“ email with a special offer or new features announcement to entice them. Bear in mind, re-engaging your old customers could be a lot easier than acquiring a new customer and may help you turn them into customers.

Manage unsubscribe email addresses with proper way like providing one click unsubscribe email feature after a long period of inactivity. You can also include a simple survey or feedback form on your unsubscribe page to find out the reason they are leaving. Then, you will need to study or at least learn from their behavior to see how you can improve your lists in the future. This will help you to keep your list clean and reduce the bounce rate.

Don’t forget your good list too. People stay because they still showing their interest to your services. There are some great tools to help you maintain a clean email list, pay close attention to the open, click and delivery as well so that you will know how to manage your good list for the next campaign. Remember to gain insight on what interests your community to keep them engaged.

Email list cleaning improves your email reputation and increases email deliverability. If you wish to grow your businesses based on real time business intelligence, focus on rules of email marketing and analyze the result of every marketing campaigns you have done. Cleaning your email list regularly with service like MailboxValidator indeed a very good idea.