You Ask, I Answer: Removing Dead Emails from Email Marketing?

In today's episode, Emily asks, I have a list of emails that haven't opened a single email in two years. I want to ask said subscribers if they want to stay before deleting them. How do I go about doing that? So there's a four-step process for this kind of list cleanliness, and it's something that's important to do. You should be doing it, you know, ideally once a quarter, uh, if not more frequently, depending on how fast your list grows uh and uh how fast it decays.

List decay in email marketing is one of the most uh important things to tackle because people do change email addresses, especially if you are marketing to like the 18 to 25 crowd, you're gonna see a bunch of email address changes uh through there. I used to work in uh financial services and student loans was a part of the company's portfolio. And obviously, once somebody graduates college, uh they tend not to keep their email address, and so you will see uh very, very rapid list decay in that industry. So the four-step process first, uh take your existing list, and it's it this is a good thing to do for the entire list, but especially for the the dormant segment, uh, and scrub it using software. Uh there are tools out there like never bounce, zero bounce, uh million verifier, uh so many that you upload your list and it checks to see if those addresses are even still working.

That's the easy low hanging fruit. Get rid of stuff that is known that you know has just gone bad uh so that you're not sending out junk uh or you're not sending to addresses that don't exist because email email providers like you know, Gmail and Hotmail and such uh very quickly ruin your reputation score if you're sending addresses that don't exist because you're essentially trying to, from their perspective, trying to just send blindly to anything with a Gmail address. So that's step one. Step two, check your deliverability and list itself. One of the things, particularly for dormant addresses, you want to look at is do they have common domains that are statistically different than the rest of your list?

So, for example, if all of your or even like half of your dormant segment is Gmail addresses, but in the rest of your list, Gmail accounts for only like five percent of your list, then that should tell you that you probably have a deliverability problem. Like you didn't set up Google Postmaster Tools, for example. And as a result, you're being penalized, and those subscribers may not even be getting your emails, much less uh being opening them and so on and so forth. Low open rates mean that people are not seeing the email uh and then not taking action to open it. And there can be a number of reasons for that, but one of them could be, particularly for services like uh Gmail or uh Outlook, because it has the priority inbox and filtering and all these smart algorithms to make email more manageable, your email list may your email may not even be seen.

So do that deliverability check, uh check out the list, check out your deliverability in general. If you have not set up uh things like uh SPF and DKIM and DMARC as email marketing protocols in your marketing, your emails may not be getting through. Third, this is where I think Emily's question was originally intended. Sending out a we want you back uh email with some kind of meaningful value proposition. Do you have something to offer this list of people, this group of people, that is different enough that from what you normally send that there would be some value?

If you're saying a B2B marketer, is there a special content, uh exclusive white paper, something that would get them to, if they see the email, open it up and go, ah, that's worth my time. Or on B2C, is there some kind of offer, coupon code, discount, exclusive product? Something that, again, there's a value proposition. You look at it and go, Yeah, I might I might find that appealing. I know for myself personally, uh, with some of the tech vendors that I work with, them saying, like, hey, here's a here's a credit to do something.

Uh, here's a uh you know, 50 free credits for this service, whatever. Like, oh, all right. I'll I'll give that a try. You have a month free on on the house. That's useful.

So you send out that email, and then obviously you move those people who do open it back into the regular list, and now you're left with essentially the the the dead group of addresses. I was gonna say dead pool, but that's a different character. At this point, you take those addresses that have just have not responded. They're still okay, but they're not responding, and they have not responded for two years, even though you've emailed them, even though you validated them, you delete them from your email marketing system. But you don't delete the list itself.

Just hold that list separate, delete it from your system. What you want to do at this point now is see if there's a way you can get those people's attention separately. So you'll take that list, uh, encrypt it, and then load it to services like Facebook, uh, Instagram, Twitter, etc. as a retargeting list to show ads to that list. Uh because you know it's still good, uh, but you know those people are not responding to you via the email channel.

So you'll upload that and run ads to those people to see if you can get their attention some other way. Now, that list is going to perform pretty poorly, right? They're already disengaged, so don't expect like miracles. You might reclaim one or two percent of it, but if you're trying to hold on to an audience, that's the way to go. In the meantime, you delete it our email marketing system because a lot of systems do charge you based on the number of contacts you have that are valid that are showing us working.

So you want to delete them out of the system, not just pause them so that you're not being charged money for essentially a part of your your list that's not performing. That's the four-step process to go through an email list and clean it up. Uh you again, you this is something you want to do quarterly. The more you do this, the the better your deliverability gets because you're sending and you're essentially getting higher levels of engagement, opens, clicks, etc., that email service providers, again, the big ones like you know Gmail and Hotmail and stuff, uh, can see and treat your email as being more relevant because you're getting more engagement on it. It's very much like social media marketing in that aspect.

Uh not that your email won't be seen in its entirety, but that it will be seen at all, it'll make it to the inbox. This is really important for B2B, because so many companies use Google uh G Suite for for their office. Use Yahoo mail. You'd be amazed at the number of company email domains that have a Yahoo back end that's doesn't say Yahoo.com anywhere in the their DNS or in their in their obvious public facing portal, but on the back end, there's their Yahoo email service back there. Uh the same was true for exchange, uh Microsoft Exchange.

So you need to have email that meets those algorithms uh screening, and that means getting good engagement. So definitely delete out of your list so that you're not getting you're dampening your engagement scores on the back end. It's a really good question. There's a lot to unpack with email marketing. If you want to do it well, uh, like I said, principally among that, scrubbing that list uh super well to make sure that it is clean.

Uh I would do a full list scrub at least once a year, and then be scrubbing every single time you upload your lists to your email software, making sure that you're uploading only good stuff to it. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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