When it comes to growing your business, many entrepreneurs live by the phrase, “the money is in the list”. Collecting contact details from current and potential customers offers an incredible opportunity to nurture leads, boost sales, and increase brand loyalty.
With a newsletter or email marketing campaign, you can keep customers informed about your latest products and services, and drive traffic to your website. It’s easy to see why many business leaders assume a bigger list automatically equals more profits.
However, the reality is, quality matters far more than quantity when managing your contact database. The more you hoard the contact details of disengaged subscribers, the more likely you are to waste money on marketing, and damage your sender reputation.
Here’s why you should regularly spring-clean your contact list.
The Benefits of Database Cleaning
Otherwise known as “list cleaning” or “email cleaning” cleaning your contact database involves examining your current list of connections and newsletter subscribers, to determine which you should remove from your ecosystem.
After working hard to capture information from thousands of leads, it can feel disheartening to remove people from your list. However, this process is essential for a number of reasons.
Regularly cleaning your contact list:
1. Preserves Your Reputation
Preserving your “IP” or “Sender Reputation” is essential to ensuring your email campaigns can actually reach and resonate with your target audience. Email service providers, like Google, examine your sender reputation when determining whether to deliver your message to an inbox, or spam folder.
If your sender reputation is low (you can check it on sites like senderscore.org), customers are less likely to see your emails. This means you end up spending money on marketing campaigns that never actually reach anyone.
Preserving a good sender reputation takes effort. You’ll need to avoid underhanded practices like buying email addresses and sending out spammy, low-quality content. However, you’ll also need to ensure you’re only connecting with customers who actually want to hear from you. Otherwise, even if you make it to their inbox, they’ll be more likely to mark you as “spam”.
2. Improves your Compliance Score
Removing people from your email list isn’t just valuable if you’re trying to preserve a good sender reputation. It can also impact how consumers and regulatory bodies view your brand. Virtually every country imposes rules on how businesses can communicate with customers.
While compliance guidelines vary, most regulatory bodies require companies to honour any request made by a customer to “leave” an email list. Failure to regularly remove “unsubscribers” from your database could mean you end up facing legal trouble and significant fines.
If your business is seen as “spammy”, this could also impact your ability to reach customers and convince them to join your subscriber list in the future.
3. Enhances Email Metrics
Making the most out of your email campaigns means constantly looking for ways to optimize how you interact with consumers. Most email marketing platforms come with tools that allow you to measure important metrics, such as open rate and “bounce rate”.
These metrics offer useful insight into how customers are engaging with your content. If you’re constantly sending emails to customers who don’t want to hear from you, those metrics are more likely to be skewed.
Investing in regular database cleaning means you can get a more accurate view of which campaigns are driving the most sales or opportunities. This could mean you can invest in more powerful marketing strategies going forward.
4. Reduces Marketing Costs
One of the reasons email newsletters and marketing campaigns are so popular in the modern world is they can deliver excellent results, with minimal outgoing costs. However, there is still a price to pay for your email marketing strategies.
Most of the time, the cost of your email marketing tools will vary depending on the size of your list. The more contacts you have to reach, the more you’ll pay for each campaign. If your list is filled with bot accounts or disengaged customers, you’re essentially wasting your marketing budget.
If you don’t regularly clean your database, your costs may go up, while your conversion rates continue to plummet. A cleaner list means you can run more cost-effective campaigns.
5. Increases Your Revenue
Cleaning your email list doesn’t just reduce your marketing costs, it can also have an impact on your return on investment. More accurate metrics from your campaigns will make it easier to implement strategies that boost your chances of future success.
What’s more, while you’re cleaning your list, you’ll have an opportunity to invest in more advanced marketing strategies. Using the data you gather about your subscribers, you can segment your audience more effectively, creating personalized campaigns for each group.
Studies suggest that revenue from email campaigns is up to 5.7 times higher when companies employ personalization techniques. Not to mention, an improved brand reputation will make it more likely customers will want to do business with you going forward.
6. Reduces Churn
A successful strategy for database cleaning doesn’t just involve removing a handful of subscribers from your list every couple of months. With the right strategy, you’ll conduct an initial clean (removing unsubscribers), then dive into the data before refining your database further.
The insights you gather into your subscriber engagement rates and other factors can be extremely useful when it comes to minimizing churn. You can pinpoint which customers are most likely to abandon your list, and consider implementing “re-engagement” campaigns to capture their attention. This could mean you avoid missing out on future leads.
You can also use analytical tools to determine what kind of factors lead to churn in your list. For instance, you might discover certain customers are less likely to be interested in your emails. This means you can improve your targeting strategies for the future.
When Do You Need to Clean Your Contact List?
Database cleaning isn’t something companies should just invest in once or twice. Most email marketing experts recommend regularly cleaning your list as frequently as possible. You may conduct a full evaluation of your contact list once every few months, for instance.
However, there are some signs you can look for that may indicate you need to perform a scrubbing session a little sooner. For instance, it’s worth paying attention to:
- Unsubscribe rates: If customers are unsubscribing from your emails more often than usual, this could be a sign you’re not targeting the right clients, or you’re producing the wrong form of email content. It may also indicate you’re not devoting enough time to segmenting your list, so you can send more personalized campaigns to the right groups.
- Bounce rates: A high bounce rate is a clear sign that you need to scrub your email list. If customers aren’t seeing your emails because they’re being redirected to the spam list, this means your sender reputation is dwindling. Ideally, your bounce rate should never be higher than 3%. Check your sender score regularly, just in case.
- Open and click-through rates: If your customers are receiving your emails, but not clicking on or interacting with them, this is another sign you may have a problem. You may need to consider A/B testing subject lines to increase engagement rates. Or you might need to personalize your campaigns more to different subscriber groups.
- Bot subscribers: A sudden increase in subscription rates, or a high number of spammy-looking email addresses could indicate you’re attracting bot subscribers. You’ll need to remove these from your list regularly to ensure you’re not wasting time and money reaching out to automated systems.
- Deliverability drops: Most email marketing tools will allow you to monitor your deliverability rates. While various factors can affect your deliverability rates, if yours suddenly begins to fall, this could be a sign more customers are marking your messages as “spam”.
If you start to notice negative feedback or reviews from customers online, talking about your poor email practices, this could also be a good indication it’s time to clean your list and rethink your marketing strategy.
Time for a Database Spring Clean?
Having a huge contact database full of existing and potential customers is great. But it’s important to focus on quality over quantity. Cleaning your database regularly will help you gain a better insight into the impact of your marketing campaigns, save money, and preserve your reputation.
Plus, good email list cleaning practices will help to protect you from potential compliance issues and negative reviews that could harm your opportunities in the future.
If you don’t have time to regularly assess your email list yourself, there’s always another alternative you can consider. A VA can handle various parts of your email strategy for you. As well as creating campaigns, monitoring metrics, and creating landing pages, VAs can also clean your database.
They can pinpoint disengaged customers, create re-engagement campaigns, and finally remove inactive subscribers from your list, saving you time and money.
Reach out to Lune Valley VA today to find out how your own VA can help you make the most of your email strategy.