Cleaning email subscriber lists can be scary. As marketers, we understand that our contacts are our greatest asset, and we work hard to grow and maintain our database. But over time, especially if it’s an older database or one managed by multiple teams or departments, data quality issues can diminish our results and impact sender reputation and deliverability .
So we need to find the best solution, facing the challenge of cleaning up our subscriber lists without losing opportunities for future engagement. We know we need to clean up our list, but we can't just go around cutting off large segments indiscriminately. For example, when we're tasked with shaping an email database before a larger mailing or when we're preparing for a data migration. But no pressure.
An industry “best practice” is to clean up your subscriber list based on the length of time since the subscriber has interacted with your email. However, the timeframe used as a criterion for determining whether a subscriber is active or inactive can vary widely, even leaving opportunities on the table. After all, there is data to suggest that sending emails to a deliverable subscriber can still have a positive effect without an open or click .
Instead, it is better to start by using the deliverability-based method to begin the trimming process.
What exactly is cutting based on deliverability?
For those looking for a more concrete way to identify bahrain telegram lead eliminate low-quality subscribers beyond historical opens and clicks, deliverability-based trimming can be a good starting point to increase your email marketing ROI . It involves three necessary steps:
Identify what your company considers a quality address based on your goals and the context in which emails are collected. For example, some companies only accept business emails, while others are perfectly fine collecting emails from free services like Google or Yahoo.
Check the quality of your email addresses by determining their deliverability. This can give you an idea of how likely you are to reach the recipient's inbox.
Get rid of undeliverable email addresses on your list , as well as any addresses your company considers to be low quality.
And while it's not always the most exciting or joyful project, trimming your list based on deliverability is one of the easiest ways to see your campaigns' ROI increase. Thanks in large part to four important aspects:
1. It can reveal dangerous data that clouds your database
If you're going to clean up your database, the first thing you need to do is separate the junk from the valuable stuff. But that's easier said than done if you're faced with a bunch of emails that aren't verified or validated.
Verification services like Kickbox allow you to understand the health of your database by categorizing email addresses and uncovering information about the deliverability and overall quality of an email address. You can use these categories as “segments” to help make decisions about what to keep and what to delete. The categories that Kickbox tracks are:
Deliverable – Safer delivery. The recipient’s mail server declares that the recipient exists.
Accept-all – Risky. The domain accepts all emails you send to it, even if the email address is invalid.
Disposable – Risky. Single-use email addresses that are typically used to receive initial communications from a service (such as an activation email) and then discarded.
Role – Risky. An email address that is associated with a team or job function rather than an individual.
Free – Potentially risky. Free email like Yahoo or Gmail, in specific contexts, businesses can receive better open/response rates when they only send to non-free email addresses.
Undeliverable – Poor quality. The email address does not exist or is syntactically incorrect.
Once you have your email addresses organized by quality and deliverability, any low-quality leads will be visible, and deciding which segments to delete will be much easier.