Email marketing is a cost-effective and highly-engaging way for businesses to reach their target audience and promote their products and services. However, it’s not just about building a large email list, it’s also important to maintain and prune your list from time to time to ensure that the people within it are engaged. This not only improves your reputation as a sender, but it also helps keep the cost of your mailing platform down by reducing the subscriber count. In this blog post, we will discuss task 5 of our 7 crucial online business housekeeping tasks for 2023, which is to prune your email list for better results.
Identify inactive subscribers
The first step in pruning your email list is to identify inactive subscribers. These are people who have not opened or clicked on your emails in a certain period of time, typically 6 months or more. You can use your email marketing platform’s analytics to identify these subscribers and segment them into a separate list.
Send a re-engagement email
Once you have identified inactive subscribers, the next step is to send them a re-engagement email. This is an email that is specifically designed to encourage them to open and engage with your future emails. You can include a special offer, a survey or even just a friendly reminder that they signed up for your emails.
Remove unengaged subscribers
After sending a re-engagement email, it’s important to remove unengaged subscribers who do not respond. This not only helps to improve your email open and click-through rates, but it also helps to keep your subscriber count down and your email marketing costs low.
Monitor bounce rates
Another important aspect of email list pruning is monitoring your bounce rates. A bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that are returned to the sender as undeliverable. High bounce rates can indicate that your email list contains invalid or outdated email addresses. By regularly monitoring your bounce rates, you can identify and remove these email addresses to improve the deliverability of your emails.
Use email verification tools
To further improve the quality of your email list, you can use email verification tools. These tools can help to validate and clean your email list by removing invalid or disposable email addresses. This can help to improve your email deliverability and reduce your bounce rates.
In conclusion, pruning your email list is an important task that should be done regularly to ensure that the people within it are engaged and interested in your business. By identifying inactive subscribers, sending a re-engagement email, removing unengaged subscribers, monitoring bounce rates, and using email verification tools, businesses can improve their email open and click-through rates, reduce their bounce rates, and keep their email marketing costs low. By carrying out these actions, you will avoid spam complaints, lower the number of bounced emails, and improve your reputation as a sender.
