Better Contact List Management: Tips For Keeping a Clean Email List
Is your bounce-back rate starting to resemble a rubber ball's? It may be time to start sweeping away bad accounts from your old email database. These are some of the top email list hygiene best practices to keep in mind as you're conducting your contact list cleanup.
Scrub at typos
This may be the most manual job for email list cleaning. Find errors, such as a misspelled domain (like @gmal.com rather than @gmail.com) or a bad format (like name!example.com). If you happen to have the name available along with the email, you may be able to catch typos in the name too.
Wipe away invalid addresses.
Remember that invalids are different than inactives. Invalid accounts bounce when they're delivered, while inactive accounts simply don't engage. With invalids, unless you can find an obvious typo, deleting them from your list is one of the most common email list hygiene best practices.
Brush aside generic emails.
Your results will be better and your B2B campaign more effective when you're emailing real people. Don't bother with [email protected] or another department-wide generic email (like [email protected]). Consider removing them while email list cleaning if they have a low engagement rate, and focus on direct emails.
Set aside inactive accounts.
This is the subtle difference between what is contact list cleaning and what is contact list management: not just scrubbing away bad emails but finding new ways to engage targeted groups within your email list. There are many ways of doing that, but the gist is to create targeted content to try and reengage this group. Also, make sure there's an unsubscribe link on your emails.
Prevent future messes.
One way to make sure there are fewer typos is to make sure the forms that the user fills out can verify the format as they enter information. Also, some use features on their form or a contact list organizer early on to segment their lists, organizing each one separately, which can help make the cleaning task less arduous in the future.
Use the powerful stuff: Buy a verified list.
Let another business do some of the contact list management for you. Bookyourdata.com, for instance, has human-verified, accurate data products that have already been combed through for generic emails and other issues. Get a clean start to add to your freshened database and simultaneously find new sales leads.
Download a premium contact list. Clean up your list and shoot for a lower bounce rate today!