Why It Is So Important to Have a Healthy Email List

Despite the newer online marketing tools currently available, a lot of businesses still rely on email marketing as a way to communicate with their audience. Email marketing has maintained its effectiveness over the years, plus the technology behind today’s email marketing tools enables better control and fine-tuning with every campaign.

Just like SEO and social media marketing, email marketing is never a one-time thing. You can’t expect to build a list once and forget about it. That list needs to be maintained for it to remain effective and healthy. There are several reasons why it is so important to have a healthy email list, and we are going to take a closer look at them in this article.

Speed Up Delivery

One of the main reasons why taking the steps to maintain your email list is a must is speedy delivery. You can speed up delivery of the newsletters you send out by keeping the recipient list optimised. This way, the system can skip sending emails to addresses that are no longer in use or ones that generate errors.

There are a lot of tools and automation options to help with maintaining the health of your email list. For instance, you can set the email marketing system to identify bounced emails and remove the recipient from your list based on the error code you get in return. Automation is a great way to minimise the number of manual tasks you need to do to keep the list effective.

“We’ve automated bounce email filtering to help speed up delivery of notifications and job offers here at Castille Resources. It brings a competitive advantage in the delivery speed the system can now maintain,” says Kylie from Castilleresources.

Reduce Cost

Removing recipients that are no longer responding to emails or are generating error messages is also a good cost-cutting measure. Many email marketing tools allocate a predetermined number of emails you can send every month; upon exceeding that allocated number, you start paying extra to get your messages across.

You’ll be surprised by how much removing bounced emails alone can help you save. An email marketing list that’s 3 years old usually has around 20% of inactive users and bad email addresses. A 20% saving is certainly worth making in any situation.

With a healthy email list, you can also stick with a service package that is the most valuable based on your audience size and delivery frequency. There is no need to pay a higher monthly fee just because you have a lot of bad emails in your list. Take the steps to remove those emails and start saving today.

Better Analytics

Next, there is the fact that bad email addresses – and an unhealthy email list in general – give you a lot of noises. At a certain point, having too many bad email addresses can seriously hurt your ability to measure the effectiveness of your mailing list. It doesn’t take long before you start getting more noise than useful data from your recipients.

A badly-maintained email marketing list is certainly bad for the long-term growth of your business. Instead of gaining a lot of advantage from the marketing campaigns, you end up paying more to deliver messages to the wrong audience. You will start losing control over the list itself and you may end up having to start all over again.

It’s Easier to Do as a Continuous Thing

Don’t wait until you see a lot of error messages and returned emails on your logs before doing sufficient email list maintenance. Maintaining the health of any email list is something that needs to be done on a regular basis. Keep a close eye on every campaign, spot issues immediately, and take the necessary actions to prevent a similar issue from happening in the future.

When you wait until there are hundreds – or even thousands – of bad email addresses to remove, the task of restoring the health of your email list becomes even harder. You’ll have to sort through extra addresses, read typos and incorrect formats, and even go through months of campaign logs just to improve the email list by a small margin.

Besides, as mentioned before, there are ways to automate most of the maintenance tasks you need to do. Check if your email marketing solution offers the right set of tools for easy maintenance. You won’t even have to break a sweat.

It Impacts the Reputation of Your List

Let’s not forget that the health of your email list will greatly influence the overall reputation of your list. When you keep sending emails to unregistered users on Gmail, for example, it really doesn’t take that long for Google to classify your email list – along with your domain name and your service provider’s IP address – as spam.

Once that happens, restoring the status of your email list is a lot more complicated. You’ll have to clean the list (yes, in the end you have to maintain the list anyway), make sure there are no rogue email addresses in it, and then file for a claim to have the domain and IP address removed from blacklist.

That’s just one blacklist. When you’re being blacklisted by Google, other blacklist services like IBM DNS Blacklist, Spamhaus, OSPAM, Sender Score Reputation Network, and SORBS will most likely add your email address and IP to their lists too. You have to manually ask to be removed from more than 100 blacklists before you can reach your audience again.

It Builds Relationship

If the previous reasons aren’t enough to convince you about the importance of email list maintenance, then the fact that you can build a better relationship with the audience and understand them better certainly will. A healthy email list lets you learn a lot from the audience. It’s not about audience segments either; you have the tools to identify smaller groups in the audience and tailor specific emails for them.

The result is clear: you’ll have a much more effective email list in terms of performance and conversion. There is no better time to start maintaining your mailing list than today.