Checking and cleaning up your e-mail lists: the right method

In today's corporate marketing and communications sector, the customer e-mail list is an indispensable tool. Nevertheless, to run an effective email campaign, you need to check and clean up your e-mail lists regularly, so you can target your customers perfectly. Find out why these checks are important, and how to ensure their effectiveness.

Why is it essential to check and clean up your e-mail list?

A quality mailing list is essential for a high e-mail reception rate.

Low-performance e-mail list, low e-mail reception rate

With obsolete e-mails or e-mails belonging to users who are not interested in your company, you reduce the percentage of messages received considerably and increase bounces. Bounces are the number of e-mails that fail to reach the user's mailbox.

These two parameters have a negative impact on your mailing campaigns, since messages are never read by recipients. These are useless e-mails that distort your results.

It's important to know that all these invalid e-mail addresses will have a significant impact on deliverability.

Why is a good deliverability rate important?

The deliverability rate represents the percentage of e-mails that have been delivered to a mailbox. A high percentage has several advantages:

• Accurate statistics
• Cost savings
• Increased conversion of your mailing campaign

A good deliverability rate ensures more accurate statistics, because conversely, poor deliverability affects your KPIs: click-through rate, open rate, etc.

What's more, a high deliverability rate saves money, as the company no longer spends money sending e-mails to addresses that don't exist or whose users are indifferent.

To achieve a high-performance mailing list that ens to the conversion and effectiveness of your marketing campaign, it's crucial to understand the difference between e-mail validation and verification, two independent phases in the process.

Two steps to clean up your e-mail list

The first step is the email validation phase, followed by the verification phase.

Validation phase

To verify and clean up your database, you need to delete invalid e-mails, correct incorrectly entered addresses and remove duplicates from the list.

Validation involves checking the syntax of each e-mail address. The domain name must exist, which means ensuring that there is an MX record associating the domain name with the mail server. For example, correct an address like "outtlook.com" to "outlook.com".

Your data list is probably quite large, so you won't be doing this manually. Automated tools can ensure effective verification. These programs will ask you to download an Excel file of your data to detect invalid e-mails.

**Some e-mails are never opened or received. For this, use your statistics tool to select a period of at least 6 months. Export your data as a CSV and filter out contacts who have never opened an e-mail during this period.

Verification phase

Verification involves testing addresses by sending emails. This stage is crucial for identifying invalid addresses. After the validation phase, companies carry out real tests.

However, sending real e-mails may cause some users to mark you as spam. Using verification tools is a more appropriate method. These tools rely on algorithms and databases to ensure accurate verification.

Practices to adopt for effective e-mail list cleansing

To reap the benefits mentioned above, here are a few practices you can implement within your company to maintain a consistent e-mail list:

Using double opt-in for new subscribers

When a user shows interest in your company by subscribing to your newsletter, send them a double opt-in email with a confirmation link. This ensures that only valid, interested addresses are added to your list.

Simplify the unsubscribe procedure

Simplify the unsubscribe procedure by including a prominent link in every e-mail. This encourages uninterested subscribers to unsubscribe rather than report your emails as spam, which is beneficial in the long term.

Handling bounces

Use the tools provided by your emailing provider to identify invalid emails after each campaign.

Even if your router will (normally!) protect you in the future from sending to these invalid addresses, analyzing these bounces, updating your CRM or even contacting your customer directly by another means will ensure that you can contact them in the future!

Deep, regular cleaning

Clean up your data regularly. Although there's no hard and fast rule, a clean-up every three months is recommended, especially if you have a large e-mail list. The more frequently you check your list, the more up-to-date and consistent it will be, ensuring the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Email verification tools can automatically identify and remove obsolete or incorrect addresses, simplifying the clean-up process and ensuring that your list remains accurate and up-to-date.

By following these best practices and using the digital tools available, you can achieve optimal cleaning of your contacts, guaranteeing the success of your email campaigns. A clean, well-managed email list is the key to an effective and profitable email marketing strategy, offering improved deliverability, increased engagement and optimized ROI.

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