The Ultimate Benefits of Scrubbing Your List

There are a great number of benefits to deleting contacts on your list. If you have a mailing service (i.e. MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber) like I do, that costs you five cents a subscriber for every email you send out, this is a good reason in itself.

I chose to go through my lists by myself. It was a big job. Most of the people who sign up on my list have heard me speak at an event. I know many people on my lists so I felt it was important to lift up the hood and see what was happening behind the scenes. I wanted to know who was actively reading my Quick Tips and what list they were on.

So how do you decide who to cut and who not to cut on your list? Here’s what I did. I kept subscribers that met at least one or more of the following criteria and deleted the rest:

1. Opened my last email.

2. Had a high open rate in the past, waned and then read one or more emails in the past five months.

3. People I know well who I want to stay on my list because they may not open the email but still see it come into their inbox. This is a reminder to these people that I want to stay connected.

So what is an open rate? When you send out an email through a mail service that tracks your emails, you can see how many people click on the email in their inbox. An open rate of 28% means that, out of your entire list or lists, 28% opened the email in their inbox.

If you want higher open rates, you need to delete those who don’t open your emails at all. Now that I have deleted half the contacts from my lists, I will see a much higher open rate at a lower cost.

IMPORTANT – People not opening or clicking on your emails can actually impact how your emails are delivered to your entire list of subscribers, even the ones who open and read your emails.

Here’s why:
Gmail and other mail service providers may choose to put your emails automatically into your recipients’ spam or junk folder. This can happen if a high percentage of your database does not open your emails. Deleting inactive subscribers is a great way to increase your open rates. Open rates are the percentage of subscribers who click open your emails(a smaller list of contacts who click open more often) Better open rates lead to improved rankings with Google.

Gmail is more likely to deliver emails to your subscribers’ inbox if your open rates are high and your bounce rates are low. A bounce rate is when the email does not get delivered to a contact on your list. This can happen when someone is on holiday and puts on their email auto responder. It can also happen when the person’s email is no longer valid.

Your mail service determines if the bounce is hard or soft. Soft bounces mean it was delivered but bounced back because the subscriber’s auto responder sent a message back upon receiving your email. Hard means it didn’t get delivered because the email address is invalid. If a soft bounce happens five times then the mail service often converts your email address to a hard bounce. Once a subscriber is rated as a hard bounce, any new emails sent are no longer delivered to that email address. The system no longer charges you for that subscriber.

Aim for a bounce rate of 5% or less. The lower the better.

Now back to you. Do you have the courage to start deleting contacts from your email list?

>>Talk to us before you delete your list. Apply for a complimentary session with a marketing expert.

If you are not currently doing email marketing, it’s never too late. I have a client who was in business for 14 years before he started. His clients and prospects love him even more now that they hear from him regularly.

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