We cannot stress this often (and enough), email hygiene is highly integral to the success of your email marketing campaign and through email hygiene, you can be sure that you are fully taking advantage of the power of your inbox. In this article, we discuss things that you might miss out on when doing your routine email marketing hygiene checkup.
The Hard Truth About Email Hygiene in 2019
ISPs are constantly checking you out and if your engagement and delivery metrics are off, there is a chance that they won’t deem your messages to be deliverable to some inboxes. This hurts your marketing campaign and your metrics.
Hard Bounces Won’t Help
Your email server will tell you if you are getting a hard bounce. Hard bounces are what you call emails that you send out but don’t land inside the intended recipient’s inbox. This really disrupts the way you record your metrics and it really messes up your email’s integrity. Remember to look out for system messages that tell you if certain emails are coming through your intended recipient’s inbox.
If you want to check on which email addresses are bouncing without having to send everyone on your system an email again, then you could do so with the help of several online applications that can check entire mailing lists for you. Don’t sacrifice the integrity of your email account.
Targeting: This is Your First Step of Not Ending Up in the Spam Folder
If you don’t know the basics of targeting, then there’s a pretty good chance that you might end up in the spam folder of a prospect’s email.
- Your subject line counts. Subject lines with the word “free” can automatically get caught by spam filters.
- Are you using the right language?
- Are you addressing your prospect properly?
- Are your email habits spammy that it leads to your prospects feeling that you’re not a legitimate business?
You have to know your audience well before you communicate with them.
Customize, Personalize, and Monetize!
If we could summarize this particular section with one phrase it would be:
STOP SENDING GENERIC EMAILS.
The reason behind this is simple, everyone wants customized and bespoke treatment and you aren’t achieving anything if you’re not being personal with your prospects.
Time to Cleanup Inactivity
This is pretty much the rule of every relationship if they haven’t been responding for quite some time, then maybe it’s time for you to cut them out. As we mentioned earlier into this article, ISPs are actively monitoring who you send out to and if people aren’t engaging with you, this will hurt your deliverability.
However, if they are a previous customer, consider creating a different email marketing plan for them. Previous customers sometimes deserve a different kind of approach in order to engage them again. You can’t send the same emails to prospects on different areas of the sales pipeline. It just doesn’t work and it is a waste of resources.
Role Accounts Have to Go!
It is always a great practice to mail to real people and not role accounts because of a couple of factors. Role accounts can be managed by different people and these people can be replaced, sending an email to these accounts is also an impersonal way of targeting prospects and could lead to your promotion getting ignored. Another issue with role accounts is that they barely engage compared to real email accounts.
Subscription Confirmation
Do you want a cleaner list overnight?
Get people to confirm their subscriptions with your list.
In this way, you’ll be able to get rid of contacts who do not want to be bothered and don’t want to engage with you. You’ll be able to narrow down your leads and make sure you properly nurture the ones that matter the most.
Verification of Leads is Important
If you decide to purchase an email list – although we advise you not to – make sure that the leads that they give you are verified. If ever you’ve built the list yourself or have asked for help from consultants, make sure that they are still verified nevertheless. This allows you to center your campaigns on real leads that are worth the effort.
Email Hygiene Checks Really Have to be Routine
Our list is timely if you haven’t checked your email lists in 2019. However, you have to make a point of consistently checking your email lists for hygiene. This can be done on a monthly basis, but at least do it once per quarter.
As you can see, it is easy to miss out on several things that we could be doing for our email campaigns. Email hygiene is essential to maintain a good database of client leads and it also helps keep lead verification efficient. Remember there are always benefits to good hygiene!
