Keep reading this article if you are curious about the 5 must-follow rules for maintaining clean email records. If the idea of a cleaning brush and your email list comes to mind when you hear “data hygiene,” you’re on the right track.
Maintaining a healthy connection with your audience requires regular maintenance, including thoroughly cleaning your email address.
In this piece, we will define data hygiene and discuss its importance to your company. In addition, we’ll provide you with five actionable steps you can take promptly to improve your email delivery and originator score by cleaning up your email information.
What is email hygiene?
When it comes to databases, what exactly is “database hygiene,” and why is it so crucial?
Email data hygiene, though the word “data hygiene” can apply to many different kinds of data, is the process of cleansing your email database by eliminating contacts (typically incorrect or unengaged) to keep your groups healthy and “warm.”
You may be asking why you should bother deleting contacts if you are testing the seas of email marketing. After all, you didn’t labor diligently to create that mailing list to throw away all those precious leads. The correct response to that question is more vital than you may realize.
Better shipper image and delivery rates result from diligent data hygiene practices. It would be best if you implemented these data hygiene best practices because doing so will increase the delivery of your future emails and, by extension, better your originator image.
Sender score
Your email provider will give you a score between 1 and 100 based on how your contacts engage with your communications. This is determined by several variables, such as the volume and regularity of your email communications and any spam reports or blacklisting your company may have received.
As you may have surmised by now, inactive or fictitious connections can significantly impact your score. Some of your older, less-active connections may do more to lower your number than to raise it over time.
If you don’t clear out your inbox of outdated contacts, your subscribers may start marking your emails as junk, and you’ll be wasting your time and theirs with every campaign you send them.
You can see where you stand compared to other senders by visiting complimentary tools like EmailOversight. While a score of less than three will enable you to sleep soundly, a score of one is preferable.
If you’re already above that threshold, continue; you’ll learn useful strategies for raising your number here.
Audit your subscriber data.
First and foremost, before you do anything else, you should thoroughly examine your email database and the trip your subscribers take. When choosing what measures to take during your email cleaning, you’ll have something concrete to return to. There are, in general, a handful of crucial factors to think about right now.
Get in touch with everyone you can and map out your next move.
A well-defined procedure for how your business functions are necessary for the success of your email marketing efforts.
However, a major oversight of many businesses is a lack of awareness of the customer experience from the moment of entrance through to cancellation.
- Consider the purpose for which you will be using the information.
One of the major principles of GDPR is that you don’t retain any client information besides what is necessary to deliver the product or service asked.
If you’re in the purse business, for instance, it’s not likely that you’d benefit from learning your customers’ political leanings or whether they favor sauce or mayonnaise on their sandwiches. You either use it or lose it.
If you’re having trouble determining what data you need, ask yourself, “How will I use this information, and how will it assist me in connecting my subscribers better?” If you’re at a loss for a response, it’s probably unnecessary knowledge to keep.
- Perform Regular Database Audits
The next stage is simple: incorporate those into your routine after establishing your starting point(s), planning your route(s), and determining the necessary information.
Keeping yourself on track is the trickiest aspect of this process. System audits should be performed at least once per month and ideally twice per week if your email marketing strategy calls for it.
- Verify your contacts as part of your email data hygiene routine.
Once you’ve finished your assessment, it’s time to start tidying up your emails, and the first order of business is to check that the names in your database are accurate.
Since this isn’t something that first-time marketers consider, you might need to employ a third-party system to discover any invalid or undelivered emails in your database.
- Contact Dormant Users
Now that we’ve got the issue of fixing errors and scammers under control, we can move on to the slightly more challenging issue of re-engaging or disengaging actual individuals.
What should you do if the email address is correct, but no one is replying? A successful strategy is to launch a “win-back” or “re-engagement” effort.
- Program segmentation
Even though it’s at the bottom of the list, this is one of the most effective methods for keeping your user base happy and your database toasty.
Unfortunately, this is one of the trickiest aspects of the process to perfect, and even the most well-known companies have trouble with it regularly.
Customers’ hobbies and traits can be used to create more tailored messages in the email division process. Emails personalized to the recipient’s tastes are always more likely to be opened and read than mass-produced messages, regardless of the industry in which you operate.
