Did you know that the average email marketer sends nearly 400 emails per year? That’s a lot of emails and it can be a big task to keep up with. But, what we told you that it’s possible to clean your email list without hurting your email marketing ROI?

It’s true! When many people think about removing inactive subscribers from their list, they worry they’ll stop getting new customers and decrease their ROI. But that just isn’t the case.

In fact, cleaning your list will do just the opposite: it will improve your ROI by increasing the number of open rates, click-through rates, and conversions per campaign. 

Why a clean email database is important

If you’ve been doing email marketing for years, chances are you’ve already got piles of outdated and faulty contacts and people who no longer wish to receive emails from you. While that’s perfectly normal, it may pose some challenges to your email marketing and prospecting such as:

• Increased likelihood of being identified as spam
• Be perceived as annoying and not trustworthy
• Breach of data protection and regulations
• Messy metrics because of high bounce rates and increased difficulty in calculating email strategy effectiveness

These are just some of the problems waiting for you if you don’t clean up your email database. If you don’t take control of the email list clutter, it’ll give birth to a longer list of complications that could mar your email strategy and hurt your ROI. That said, here’s how you can begin to declutter your lists.

Get rid of SPAM

The main reason you want a clean email marketing database is you want to make sure that everyone on that list is genuinely interested in receiving your emails. One way to get rid of spam is to identify hard bounces — email that never reaches its destination —  and take them off the list forever. 

Another way to get rid of spam is by giving subscribers a way to opt out and unsubscribe. Though it’s hard to see subscribers go, more subscribers doesn’t necessarily translate to genuine interest. You can also find inactive users and give them a similar option to tap out.

Give subscribers a way to unsubscribe. Having more subscribers contributes absolutely nothing if they are not interested in your submissions. What’s more, having uninterested subscribers can even hurt you, as they won’t open your emails and could even flag you as spam. That’s why it is important to always make it easy for users to unsubscribe with just a single click. Find inactive users and offer them the opportunity to unsubscribe. 

You can also look at low-quality contacts. These contacts have not explicitly consented to be part of your database, so it is best to ask them for their consent. If they say no, delete them from the list.

Keep your data organised

Okay, so you’ve already gotten rid of all the bad eggs or bad apples, now it’s time to organise what’s left. You can do this by revisiting inconsistent data and reformatting them. The idea is to resolve inconsistencies in standard form fields like first and last names, phone numbers, postal addresses, and email addresses and choose a unique format for each in order to unify submissions. 

Another way to keep data organised is by drop-down options with closed responses. What this does is provide users with standard options that allow users to choose an option that best suits their case.

Finally, look out for duplicate contacts. Sometimes, the same person may be registered several times and receive your emails more than once. So, look out for repeated data and get rid of it.

Perform monthly clean-ups

Cleaning your email database shouldn’t be a one-and-done deal. Instead of waiting for things to pile up, perform the cleaning process on a regular basis. Performing monthly cleanups can help you ensure that low-quality email contacts don’t accumulate in your database and give you a hard time later on.

With these tips and tricks, your email marketing metrics are about to start soaring, and your contact lists will be cleaner than ever!