Clean Up Your Email List for Better Results

Most of the time, we in the email marketing business talk about how to grow your list and expand your audience. But as we enter the winter doldrums -- New Years is long over, the Super Bowl champion has been decided, March Madness and baseball have yet to start -- now is the time to take a step back and clean up your email list.

Get scrubbing your list by:

• Looking at your bounce reports and removing all those who have non-existent or non-active email addresses. This is the low-hanging fruit. These people aren’t getting your emails anyway and are just taking up space on your list. Removing them could save you some money if you use an email service provider that charges based on the number of people on your list.


• Taking a look at your subscribers to see which ones have or have not opened at least one of your campaigns in the last 12 to 18 months. For those who haven't opened at least one, send them a re-engagement message asking them if they still want to receive your messages. If they say no, take them off the list. Don't take it personally when people say no, as your goal is to be sending to people who want to get your emails.

Those are two simple steps to cleaning up your list and removing the people who aren't getting your emails or simply aren't interested anymore. Taking things a step further, you could use the end of the year to segment your list so you can better tailor campaigns to specific customers:

• If your business offers multiple products or services, segment your lists by customers who use each product or service. This way, they're only getting information about the products they use. You can use your existing customer data for this or send out a survey asking subscribers which specialized lists most interest them.


• Ask your customers to provide their city and state information, and use that to build geographic-based lists.


• Utilize a service such as Flowtown to help build a social profile of your subscribers, allowing you to better target and offer special offers to those who use Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks.

By segmenting your list and sending tailored campaigns to those most interested in receiving them, this should increase your overall open rate, click throughs, and customer engagement.

It's my hope that these steps will make your list healthier going forward, ensuring that you're sending to people who truly want to receive your messages.