Every business aims for the highest customer engagement rate, and for email marketers, this is your ultimate goal.
Many factors affect this goal, and topping the list is email deliverability and hygiene. Beyond the regular monitoring of your email marketing metrics, maintaining a clean list is an ultimate rule that email marketers are required to live by.
When it comes to launching a successful email campaign that targets the right kind of people, list hygiene, specifically, should be your top priority.
Email hygiene refers to the cleansing of your email list—in other words, removing invalid and uninterested e-mail addresses from your address list and sending out only relevant messages to your subscribers.
Why does email hygiene matter?
- As email nurturing strategies become popular, complaints about fraud like financial scams become a more serious issue email users face. In response, individuals become wary about the emails they receive, particularly when they are repetitive and come from the same sender.
- Poor quality emails can compel even top subscribers to stop responding to your efforts, harming your brand image and the success of your campaigns in return.
- Businesses also need to maintain a good sender reputation to maintain continuous engagement with their leads. An increase in unsubscriptions, inactivity, and spam reports are going to make Email Service Providers (ESP) discredit you as a service provider and increase the possibility of your emails not being delivered to your receiver’s inbox.
A clean, healthy, and highly engaged email list can take your email marketing efforts far. Here are 5 best practices to follow for good email hygiene and deliverability
Delete your inactive subscribers
Email list cleansing is a vital step for email list hygiene but at the same time, this is a path that must be treated carefully. While disengaged subscribers will harm your campaign results, never delete them before sending re-engagement emails.
A re-engagement email gives your subscribers the opportunity to stay on your list if they are still interested in receiving your messages.
But sending out re-engagement emails and deleting your inactive subscribers aren’t enough to better your campaign results. In addition to both these steps, it’s critical to evaluate the cause behind decreased email engagement.
Your subscribers may go inactive because:
- Your content is not relevant
- Your email didn’t stand out from the rest
- You’re not sending out enough emails or you’re sending too many emails
- You haven’t sent out value-added content in addition to promotional content
Segment your list
Another step to cleansing your list is segmenting it—this is a step you can even try before deleting your inactive subscribers.
If a subscriber has been inactive for a while, try moving them to a different segment of your list where the content you send out may be more relevant to that particular subscriber.
You could also reduce the number of emails you send out every month to these subscribers. For instance, if you usually send an email every week, try reducing this segmented list to two or one email per month.
Once this strategy has been tested over a certain period check your engagement to see if any improvements can be seen, if these subscribers remain inactive go ahead and remove them.
Enhance your subject lines
Once you have built your subscribers list, it’s important to keep them engaged with your content.
If you’ve ever wondered why your open rate is low, even with high-quality content, it may be because your email subject lines are not enticing enough to prompt an open.
The trick is to keep your subject lines short, clear, and capable of sparking curiosity.
An average office worker receives about 121 emails daily. If you want them to see your message, you need subject lines that are catchy and can stand out from the flood of other emails they receive.
This means you need to target the right audience.
After segmentation, the next step is to send the right emails to the right target audience. Whether you’re segmenting your list based on location, purchase history, interests or other categories like age, make sure you tailor your message to each of your separate lists.
Sending poorly targeted emails can put off your potential customers and prompt them to unsubscribe from your list or direct your emails to spam.
It’s better to not send out an email than to send out emails that don’t take advantage of strong list segmentation, so invest in crafting your campaigns.
Use a professional email address
Using a professional domain ending in your company name—for example, @yourcompany.com—to send out marketing messages rather than a personal account has its perks.
It makes your emails look more professional and authoritative and complies with the DMARC policy.
DMARC or Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance is a message authentication protocol that helps email senders ensure that no other parties use the name of their company to send spam or fraudulent emails.
Most spam email accounts camouflage themselves to look like they are from a reputed, well-known company.
Because of the DMARC, ESPs may also think that the marketing emails sent through personal email accounts are from scammers, which increases the risk of your emails going to your receiver’s spam folder.
Personalise your emails
Good email hygiene also involves making sure your content is relevant—a strategy that shows your recipients that the emails you send to them are crafted for them specifically. This motivates them to open your message and increases the likelihood of them engaging with it.
Start from the address line—instead of the abstract ‘Dear Customer,’ write the name of your receiver. Personalised subject lines have been shown to generate a 50% open rate.
Your message should also include relevant information—providing your subscribers with content that is helpful and makes sense for them.
On top of creating a sense of trust and loyalty, personalisation also helps recipients identify credible emails from spam. This is because spam emails generally don’t personalise their messages. Take, for instance, Paypal scams. Instead of using the recipient’s name in the subject line, spammers would use a standard phrase like ‘Dear Paypal User’.
Email hygiene sends the right emails to the right people
With the hygiene best practices discussed above, you can improve your email deliverability and ultimately enhance the success of your campaigns in the long term.
You won’t just be able to engage with your customers efficiently, but you will also be able to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and what they expect and want. This will, in turn, improve your brand value and reputation while boosting customer loyalty.
If you’re interested in learning more about email best practices, schedule a free consultation with Launchy experts today!