How, when and why to clean up your email database

Having many subscribers does not mean that your business is going to get a lot of sales. In fact, let us tell you one thing; Quality is more important than quantity.

Isn’t it better to send a newsletter to 100 subscribers and have 50 open them? Without a doubt, this is preferable to sending 10,000 emails and having only 1,000 open for you, don’t you think?

Therefore, cleaning your email databases from time to time is a task that you must do, since it will help you define and design your email marketing strategy and improve your content.

Email database: why clean it and when?

The email database is a key piece for your business. This means that a user gives you their email because they are interested in your content or something that you offer. And that email is of great value to you, since you can chat with them and create a special connection.

So, considering the importance of having quality databases for your business’s email marketing strategy, it is inevitable that we also talk about why and when it is convenient to clean your contact lists.

Go for it!

➽ What does cleaning an email database involve?

When we talk about cleaning email databases we are referring to deleting those contacts that are inactive (or that subscribed many years ago) in your database.

The ideal is to keep your email list updated, leaving only your active subscribers, who are the ones who really have an interest in you and are fans of your brand.

Yes, although at first you are scared to delete them, since it was very difficult for you to get those subscribers …

➽ Why clean the database for email marketing?

Cleaning email databases will help you guide your email marketing strategy but, specifically, it will help you to:

➽ When is the time to clean up email databases?

Whenever you send an email and receive spam, block and bounce notifications, you should clean up your contact list. Although it is also likely that you should do it in some cases when emails reach the inbox of your subscribers.

These are the indicators that will alert you to clean up:

• The opening rate begins to drop over a period of time.
• Disinterested subscribers who don’t care about your brand.
• Subscribers who don’t interact with your brand (but don’t know why).
• Invalid and suspicious email addresses.

Clean email database step by step

Now that you know the importance of having a clean database for email marketing, it’s time to take the plunge and take action.

We tell you below what are steps to clean your email list and we give you some creative ideas to keep it healthy.

➽ How to clean your email list?

To make your email list attractive to your emails and your campaigns are effective, you must perform the following steps:

Eliminate inactive contacts

Get rid of users who haven’t answered you in a long time. One way to find these quickly is through segmentation.

For example: Segment your list according to the interaction of your subscribers. This will allow you to immediately find those who did not open your emails in a long period (6-12 months).

Then send them a reactivation email to find out why they didn’t click on your emails. If he doesn’t answer you, it’s because that person lost interest. So you can now delete it and you can focus on those who do want to continue receiving your notifications.

Discard kills, rebounds, and blocks

After each campaign, stop and look at your subscriber list. From your email marketing software, access your statistics of the campaigns you have already sent and filter them by bounces, losses and spam.

From there you can already delete those contacts that are useless to you.

Delete suspicious contacts

If you see contacts with strange names, with invalid symbols or emails that seem suspicious of spam, delete them too.

This will ensure you have a safe and healthy database!

Avoid duplicate data

If you find two equal data, you will have to decide which is real and which is false. And although your email marketing tool cannot detect it, it is a task that will require testing and analysis.

➽ 5 Tricks to maintain a quality database

If you want to have a healthy email database for email marketing, here are some ideas we suggest:

1. Ask your subscribers

We know that having a subscriber retained because it does not help you. It doesn’t give you any value. Therefore, to know if someone has mistakenly subscribed, they are no longer interested in your posts or for what other reason they do not click on your emails, you should ask them directly.

For this, we propose these ideas:

After sending these questions to them, make a segmentation list with those who answered you and those who didn’t. You will have to delete the latter to avoid messing up your email database.

2. Put in place a double confirmation system to subscribe

Another trick to get a healthy database for email marketing is to implement this system; with the aim of sending a second email to the user who has just subscribed to confirm their subscription, by clicking on a link.

With this, only the interested ones will bother to click to confirm the subscription and you will avoid entering false addresses.

3. Send a reactivation campaign with these elements

It may happen that a subscriber interacts little with your content because they already read your posts in other ways, because they don’t have time or because the email got lost. So beware that a subscriber who interacts little may be interested in your brand.

For this it is useful to send a reactivation email, to understand the behavior of these subscribers and know the exact reason why they do not show interest.

Therefore, a campaign of this type must have some elements like these:

• A matter that generates emotion and arouses curiosity.
• An attractive image.
• In the body, ask them directly why they do not interact and leave them several options (A, B, C …) so that they respond quickly.
• Give them the option to unsubscribe if they are not interested in your business, guiding them with a call to action.
• Offer them an advantage such as a discount or access to your most valuable content.
• And close by reminding them of the reason for your email, stating how important your subscribers are to you.

Note: After this email, depending on the responses of your subscribers, you may be in for a surprise. Perhaps you conclude that most are inactive because they read you more on Instagram. So then you must re-focus your email marketing strategy and create new content on this channel.

4. Don’t hide your button to unsubscribe

The subscriber must find at the end of your emails, an easily accessible link to unsubscribe if they wish. It is a way to avoid being marked as spam.

5. Forget about buying email lists, it’s a bad practice!

It is not recommended to buy an email database. Do you want to know more about this topic?

We leave you this post to delve into it >> Buying email databases: yes or no?

CONCLUSIONS:

A clean email database will allow you to get closer to your subscribers, generating interesting conversations, and most importantly … You can draw conclusions and refocus your email marketing strategy based on these data!

We invite you to reflect. Why do you want to take up space in an inbox if that person doesn’t interest you? Start your cleaning now and tell us about your experience.

Have you ever launched a revival campaign ?; What conclusions did you draw?