You wouldn’t have thought that your email list would require cleaning too. But, well, it does and that too on regular intervals. EmailAn email (or electronic mail) is a method of exchanging communications through the internet. It is one of the most used features on the web and the number one mean... scrubbing is that action you take wherein you keep a healthy email list for your business. Through this process, you remove all the unwanted elements from the email lists. 

Here, the unwanted elements don’t mean bugs or viruses. Rather, these elements are your users. But why are they unwanted? You may wonder, “They are my customers only. Why would I want to remove them?” Think of it this way, you’ve not used a pen for over four months. You used to write with that pen frequently but you don’t do that anymore. The reasons for that could be many. But the main problem is that you don’t use it anymore. So, this pen is not adding any value for you.

In a similar manner, unwanted users aren’t doing you any good for your business. They are just staying there on your list for a long time without making a step towards engagement. So, you’d obviously want to remove them. 

Once these users are removed from your email list, you get a clean list. Then, with this clean list, you may start an email campaign. 

There’s something that you’ve to remember, though. Before you remove them completely, you should try to contact them again. Here, you’d send them a re-engagement email. Upon getting this email, they have two choices. They may engage with you again, or they can unsubscribe. In case they’re unsubscribing, you should let them go. And this is where you’ll finally finish with your email scrubbing. 

Read more in this article to know the steps for cleaning your email list. We’ve also discussed a few important tips that would be helpful while doing this process. 

What Is Email Scrubbing? 

Cleaning an email list is an essential part of email marketing. It’s the process that requires you to segment the users in your email list and remove the inactive users from it. Many marketers do it to have a healthy email list in front of them. But the purpose of cleaning email lists isn’t only to do that. 

The biggest reasons to do this practice are to have better deliverability rates on your emails and to have few spam complaints. If you’ve too many inactive users on your email list, then there wouldn’t be a profit from sending these emails. Plus, these inactive users may put your emails in the spam folder or block you altogether. All of this would hurt the company image that you’ve made in a long time. 

So email scrubbing becomes important to market your business and lead towards growth. 

There are certain factors that you’ve to consider before you begin cleaning your email list. The factors that you look for are ones that would tell you why your emails are performing poorly. These include the following. 

• Bounces: Before you begin cleaning your list, you’d want to know what you’ve to do. One of the reasons may be that your emails are bouncing and not reaching the targeted users. The reason for this may be your email marketing tool or a technical glitch. Do make sure that you check for these details prior to cleaning.  

• Email Lists: Then, you’ve to see what your email list is like. Who all are the people included in these lists? Think of how you have segmented them in these lists. Some of the users opt for only certain types of emails. So you should know who these users are. 

Start doing your main task once you’ve resolved these factors. 

How To Scrub Your Email List? 

Email scrubbing is a necessary option that you’ve to do from time to time. The longer you hold on to doing this task, the low scores you’ll get for that period of time. To get good sender scores and scrub your email list, follow these steps. 

• Look For Inactive Users and Segment Them: Inactive users are those who’ve not engaged with your business in a long time. The long time depends on you and the frequency of your emails. If you send two emails in a week and there are users who’ve not seen these emails in over 5 weeks, they may be known as inactive users. You’ve to identify all such users then, you should segment them from your email list. For segmentation, you may use email marketing tools like Mailchimp or Sendinblue. 

• Verify Your Email List: For the next step, you’ve to verify your email list. By verifying your email list, you’ll be able to maintain a healthy list and a good reputation. You may prevent sending emails that end up in people’s spam folders. Here, too, you can use an email marketing tool that’ll easily help you in email verification by identifying duplicate or spam emails. 

• Send Out Re-Engagement Emails: The third step in email scrubbing would be to send out re-engagement emails. You should send these emails to those users who’ve not engaged with you in a while. The aim of re-engagement is just to get those users back. Then, it depends on the users if they want to engage back with you or not. 

• Use Clean Email List to Re-Engage: Lastly, when you’ve cleaned your whole email list, you may re-engage with your users. You may create a new email campaign and send out emails to these users. 

Top 5 Tips to Clean Email List

Now that you know the steps to clean your email list, pay attention to these useful tips. 

• When you’re cleaning your email lists, start with the ones that are most active. There are chances that you’ll remember the usernames in that email list because you frequently engage with these people. When you start here, the process happens fast. But, with that, don’t forget your other lists. There may be 10 or 12 email lists that you manage. You should clean them all, but it’ll be helpful to get a fast start. 

• Cleaning email lists is really like cleaning your dishes. Piling the dirty dishes on top of one another will result in a mess by the end of the week. To save yourself from an uneventful weekend, make and follow a schedule. You may set a fixed day and time for when you’ll do this task. Since there are many tools that you can use for it, it shouldn’t come off as difficult for you. 

• Remove all those people who’ve unsubscribed from you. If you want to do business ethically, then you should listen to what people are saying. Once someone presses that unsubscribe button, you should remove them from your list too. This doesn’t come off as rude to people because it’s not annoying. Rather, it’s the opposite of annoying because now people won’t have to get unnecessary emails from you. The plus point for you is that you can now fully pay attention to the people who do want to hear from you. 

• Know the difference between spam email addresses and typos. A spam email address may look like – appter5498123ltbe@gmail.com. Whereas, an email address with a typo may look like – jonahsnith@gmail.com. 

Pros and Cons 

Email scrubbing is a process that helps you in many ways. Nevertheless, there can be some disadvantages to doing this too. Listed below are the pros and cons of this process. 

Pros

• When you do regular cleaning of your email list, you’re ensured that your data stays protected. This data stores all the customer information. Cleaning helps you maintain all these records about your customers. 

• Cleaning up your email list also helps you in having better delivery rates. Since you’ve removed all the unnecessary emails from the email list, your emails are delivering to the right people now. 

• This practice also helps in staying connected with your customers. When you routinely do this task, you can identify the email addresses of your loyal customers. You know that these people are active and they frequently engage with you and buy products from you. 

Cons

• Identifying the spam email addresses and the email addresses with typos may be difficult for you. It’s because many times both of them can appear to be the same. For instance, an email address like – choiashle@gmail.com may look like a typo to you. You’d think that there’s only an alphabet that’s missing in the name. But, it could be that it’s a spam email address that’s designed to look like a typo. 

• If you’re not using a legitimate email list cleaning tool, then it can become a problem for you. It may happen that you can lose your whole email list because of a cheap application. 

• In case you don’t follow a routine, you may make major mistakes while cleaning the list. As mentioned earlier, the task can pile up. If that happens, you’ll try to hurry with everything. In that hurry, you may end up losing the email addresses of your active users. 

In Conclusion

For marketers, it’s crucial that they have a clean email list when they’re doing email marketing. In case your email list is full of duplicate email addresses or inactive users, all your marketing efforts would mean nothing. This could mean that the email campaign that you’ve been working on for the last two months would not bring you any fruitful results. 

Imagining this is enough to make you panic. But hey, there’s no need to panic. The process of email scrubbing is really easy if you do it from time to time. Plus, there are email marketing tools at your end which would make the process even easier for you. 

But before you sit down to do this task, you’ve to pay attention to certain factors. These are the factors why you’re doing this task in the first place. The task is basically to solve a problem in front of you. You know the problem at hand, but you don’t know the source of this problem. 

Therefore, you need to identify all these sources. You know that your emails aren’t performing well. One of the reasons could be that they’re bouncing and not reaching the inbox of your users. Another reason could be that your users aren’t segmented well. They’re in there is a giant email list, even though they don’t have to be. This would of course lead to chaos. 

When you’ve attended to these root causes, then your work becomes easier. From here, you just have to start with the steps of cleaning the email list. 

What email marketing tool do you use? Did you like the tips we included? Tell us in the comments below!