Growing up, I’m sure all of us were taught how important it is to maintain hygiene. As a kid, your parents would’ve no doubt instilled in you the value of keeping yourself clean and having a tidy room. Today we’re going to discuss a different kind of hygiene: Email hygiene.

The Significance of Email Hygiene

Email hygiene is the procedure for deleting any “bad” email addresses from your company’s email lists. These “poor” emails have an impact on your bounce rate, which is the proportion of outgoing emails that aren’t delivered.

You can reduce the amount of failed emails sent by cleaning and updating your lists. It’s critical you do so, as this will in-turn result in:

• Improved click rates on mails
• Lower sending expenses email marketing provider
• Better customer targeting and connection possibilities 
• Increased income potential
• More precise measures of your email campaign’s performance

If you don’t do regular cleaning, you’ll not only lose out on all of the benefits mentioned above, but you’ll also increase your chances of your email hosts blacklisting you. If mailing lists get too “cluttered” your IP’s rep suffers, and your email messages begin to travel straight to the spam folder, instead of the inbox.

And don’t believe this won’t have a major impact on your company’s email marketing:

• Over 90% of emails are deemed worthless by ISPs.
• Every year, approximately 22% of email databases decay organically.
• Email deliverability is a problem for more than 70% of businesses.
• An email list’s inactive subscribers account for more than 50% of the total number of subscribers.

These factors make email hygiene critical to the success of your email marketing campaign. It’s important to get started cutting down your lists right away.

Keeping Track of Your Mailing Lists and Evaluating Them

When you’re initially narrowing down your listings, start with eliminating the hard bounces. When an email is sent to an address that is closed or incorrect, it causes a hard bounce. This can happen when: a company shuts down, an employee quits, or if a firm’s email servers were changed. Any emails addressed with unresolvable problems can be deleted right away.

After that, concentrate on resolving the soft bounce problems. Soft bounces are transitory problems that impact your bounce rate and may occur if the receiver’s inbox is filled up, their server is down, or the email is too big.

Then, you must choose if you want or don’t want to include “role” accounts in your lists. Email accounts for each department of a company are referred to as role accounts (emails specifically for sales, marketing, HR, etc). Since they’re controlled by several people, these accounts will often ignore your emails. Decide whether or not these accounts are regularly interacting with your messages, and if they aren’t, consider deleting them.

You must provide information that receivers will find interesting enough to keep them from unsubscribing. This entails writing a compelling subject line that will entice them to check out what the email is about, personalizing the content for the recipient, and creating aesthetically appealing email formats. If you don’t, then even with super clean and up-to-date lists, you’ll still struggle to have success with your email marketing.