Why it’s Important to Keep your Mailing List Clean

Hey guys, Hope you're doing great! We all know how important email lists are, these are real sales engines for all the email marketers. Having a mailing list isn't just a money-making opportunity, it's also a responsibility. Yes, right, you are responsible of what you do and what you send. It's really important to keep your email list updated and clean. I know how sad it is to remove inactive subscribers and reduce the total amount of your subscribers, but it's a must, and I'm going to tell you why. Let's start! 1. Deliverability problems All the email lists have inactive subscribers. And the biggest problem is that we keep them on the list with the hope they someday become active ones... but they do not reply, do not click links. We keep emailing them, and that's wrong. We ruin our deliverability because of our greed. There is no sense of sending 100th email to a person that wasn't active with the last 99 emails. 2. Reputation Reputation means everything to an email marketer. Internet service providers watch your reputation score when you run your mailings directly and they decide whether to pass your mailings or not. If you send emails to a list where a half (let's just imagine this) of subscribers is inactive then your score is bad and you should feel bad :) Also, it's really important to be respected by your internet service provider and your email marketing service provider, if you use email services instead of email software. The better your list is the better your sender-score is. 3. Not only you, but also your recipients are watched Internet service providers and all the email service providers (gmail, hotmail, aol, yahoo and all the others) have their algorithms on defining spam or bad messages. All the incoming emails are analyzed on opens and click-throughs. If you send a lot of email campaigns, and you have many inactive subscribers then your open rates and click-through rates are really low and this is the road to a SPAM folder. And if many of your recipients receive your mailings to a spam folder directly then you can stop using your mailing server, sender name and from address immediately - you will be flagged as a spammer soon, so there is no sense to continue campaigns :( 4. When to remove inactive subscribers? Well, it really depends on the size of your list. The bigger the list is the less impact inactive subscribers have. This means that you really need to care a lot about your small email list. It's also easier to keep a small email list clean. Just for example, 50 inactive or unsubscribed subscribers on a small list is a huge percentage of inactive recipients and this should be fixed immediately, on the other hand 50 inactive subscribers on a large list of thousands of emails is an ordinary practice. I don't say you should keep them on the list and email them all the time, but they have less impact on your reputation and sender-score, but only if they are a small part of the large list. Now you understand how bad it is to keep unsubscribed or inactive recipients on your list. It's really up to you whether to re-engage them or to remove, but that's a different story :) just wanted to remind you of how important it is to keep your email list clean and updated. Wish a respect and high sender-scores! Have a great day.