Email Distribution List: How Often Should You Scrub Your Email List?

Email marketing has a 99.7% open rate and a 41.8% click-through rate. That's a lot of valuable engagement for one platform. Unfortunately, email marketing is also very easy to abuse.

Email Distribution List: How Often Should You Scrub Your Email List?

Email marketing has a 99.7% open rate and a 41.8% click-through rate. That's a lot of valuable engagement for one platform. Unfortunately, email marketing is also very easy to abuse.

Companies solicit emails from customers, who then see ads from other companies. If you're not sophisticated, your customers may think your company sold their email addresses.

A good email distribution list can benefit a brand, but keeping it unique and high-quality is hard work. Here is more information about how often you must scrub your email list to ensure that the right people get your message.

Why Build an Email Distribution List?

Email marketing is one of the top drivers of traffic to a website. It is one of the many ways you can connect with consumers to let them know what your brand offers.

An email list is a compilation of email addresses that you have collected from customers or visitors. With the best content, you can reach out to customers who want to know more about your discounts, updates, or other new information about your business.

Emails are also great because you can digitally send one in an instant directly into someone else's inbox. Email lists are more important these days because email marketing is as effective for advertising as social media.

If anything, you are more likely to get a higher click-through rate through emails rather than tweets. This is because people trust emails more than any random posts they see online. Sending an email is so much more effective when it comes to acquiring new customers.

Powerful Communication Method

It is always best to allocate some of your marketing budget for email marketing and social media ads. To get the most out of this form of marketing, you need to have a catchy CTA on your homepage that can be a source to help you build your email distribution lists.

The more people you get to subscribe to your email list, the more powerful it will be to help increase brand awareness. It is important to note that people who join your email list from your site will be easier to entice through the right content.

These people already trust you and your brand and will be open to receiving emails from you. Therefore, email marketing is a mighty communication channel that does not get enough attention compared to social media advertising.

How to Build an Email List?

Remember that you want to give customers more opportunities to sign up for your email list. The best way to do this is to create CTA buttons that encourage people to subscribe to every landing page your site presents.

You can also use pictures that slide in or pop up on your landing pages. Many people use surveys that timely pop up when a person is browsing a business website.

The key is to get people interested in your content so that they want to subscribe to learn more information. The best thing is that it is easy to build an email list, mainly if you use email marketing software. This will help send bulk email notifications to all your subscribers.

Then you can let them know about your new online store or blog updates about services. If someone wants updates from you, they should fill out a form or sign up for your email list.

This step may involve confirming their email address to ensure that you have actual people and not bots. The user has already shown interest in your content or product, or they would never subscribe to your list. Therefore, it is up to you to deliver highly relevant offers to keep getting good results.

Timed Pop-up Survey

It is necessary to remember that people do not visit websites and look for an email sign-up form. You need to make your viewers feel invested in your branded content before presenting them with a pop-up that asks for their contact details.

To build an email list, you need to reach visitors on specific pages across your site. This needs to involve surveys related to your content. For instance, people are more willing to answer poll questions because they are fun and easy.

One of the best examples is the University of Alberta. Their email distribution list skyrocketed in a year thanks to their timed pop-up survey asking if the reader would like to answer "yes" or "no" to sign up for their Daily News email.

This pop-up only appears after someone stays on their site for longer than 10 seconds. Then you know they are receiving value from your content, which is when it is hot enough to strike to send a pop-up that collects their personal information.

Use Humor

Nothing beats giving somebody a good laugh on a Monday morning. Everyone enjoys a decent giggle when it comes to entertaining people, especially if you send them some content in their inbox directly. Making consumers smile can help them remember your brand.

They will feel more connected to it compared to your competitors because you will develop a stronger relationship with your consumers in no time. It always helps to understand your audience to give them what they want.

Then they will be more willing to sign up for your newsletters. People who enjoy your content will share it with their loved ones to help your website receive more hits.

Keeping Email Distribution List Clean

The first step to keeping your email KPIs strong is by having a scrubbed email distribution list. A clean list with an excellent email marketing strategy will do wonders to ensure your spam rates stay low.

The more people subscribe to your email list, the more chances you have of people losing interest in your content if it does not appeal to their needs.

Therefore, it is always best to review engagement to remove subscribers who are not interested anymore before they hit that button to unsubscribe.

Limiting unsubscribes is the best thing for a business, but you should continually monitor your email distribution list to avoid spamming those who do not want to receive your content.

Reduce Complaints

Scrubbing your email distribution list is necessary because spam complaints will hurt your brand's reputation with ESPs. For instance, if your emails are always getting marked as spam, your ESP will think that your account is sending solicitations that no one wants.

Be careful of this because your deliverability rate may plummet if you let too many unsubscribes happen. Always focus on improving deliverability. Remember that the cleaner your email list is, the more subscribers will want to open your newsletters.

People who do not engage or have changed their email address will spam bounces and filters, damaging your deliverability.

Cleaning the Email List

Your email distribution list needs to be cleaned at least once a year. Always review your click-through rate, spam rates, and unsubscribes. This will provide the clearest picture of who is connecting and engaging with your campaigns.

Then you can find out what they like and do not like to improve your content. You also want to consider the number of subscribers every few months. If you have a lot of subscribers, you need to go over your list more often.

This way, if you see many bounces, you know when to clean your list. Every brand needs a good clean-up, which should be done annually, monthly, quarterly, or bi-annually depending on how many people subscribe to your page.

How to Clean?

Before cleaning your list, you may want to identify if a subscriber is inactive. This means that you need to remove them. If someone is a little "disengaged" instead of inactive, you can target to market them with more content to refresh their interest in your newsletters.

Being disengaged means someone has not opened any of your emails in a few months. Check to see if they have clicked on any links on your page through your emails.

After sorting out the ones who are unsubscribes and those who are disengaged, you need to place these in another list.

This will help you identify a strategy to get the disengaged members back into your community by engaging them with a discount code or a personalized subject line.

Before writing any of your disengaged clients out, you should try reengaging to see if they can love your email content again since they signed up for it for a reason.

Then you need to find out why your bounce rates are not great. You have to get rid of emails with hard bounces but keep soft ones around to see if you can resolve them in time.

Scrub Your Email Distribution List Today

Now that you know how often to clean your email distribution list, it is time to get scrubbing. Always check for inactive subscribers so you can remove them to avoid your emails getting marked as spam.

This is because spam filters will damage your reputation and deliverability. Contact us today, and we can help you clean up your email distribution lists to ensure that your brand does not end up with a high bounce rate.