Four Ways to Keep Your Email Lists Healthy

Let’s face it no matter how great you are at building your email lists, over time there will always be a percentage of emails that can cause you some issues which can lead to some pretty nasty surprises for your email campaign analytics.

Managing and maintaining your email lists will help you lower your bounce rates which reduce your chances of being blacklisted and help to ensure that your emails not sent to the spam or junk folder.

Maintaining your email lists are a bit different from maintaining a car but it works the same, if maintained well then everything will work smoothly. Here are four easy steps you can take to ensure that your email list is kept in tip-top condition.

1. Continuously clean your lists

This is best done after every email campaign you send out. Go through your email analytics and check your unsubscribes and hard bounces. These should be removed from your email list so you do not send to them anymore. Most email platforms will automatically look after your unsubscribes for you. When you keep sending emails to bounced emails you run the risk of being flagged as a spam emailer (no one likes this, no one).

2. Email regularly

One of the best ways to ensure that your email list is current, is to at least plan an email campaign to your audience once a month. This will allow you to view auto responders and bounces so you can take action on them immediately. People move around and their email addresses can change, this will ensure that you have the most current contact details of your audience.

3. Find out why your contacts are inactive

Give your contacts a way to opt out easily (everyone likes easy). A one question survey works a treat so they can unsubscribe or stay subscribed and you can find out the reason why they are not reading your email campaigns. This is a great insight to help you to adjust your email campaigns and deliver content that is relevant to your audience.

4. Use segments and keep them updated

Know your audience, know what content they want from you. Do they want an update from your blog, promotional emails, updates from the company or something else. When you segment your list you will be able to continue delivering high quality content that is relevant to your readers and they will love you for it.

Related: How list segmentation affects engagement.

These four steps will help ensure that your emails will be read by your intended audience. After all it makes no sense to create an amazing campaign email and then have it die on the way to the recipient.

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