5 Tips For Acing Your Email Hygiene

Yes, you are right! Email hygiene plays a vital role in your business. Always remember, a short but well-maintained clean list of email IDs is more effective than a long list of irrelevant contacts. Moreover, maintaining proper email hygiene improves the sender’s reputation & the deliverability rate of the content.

Email marketing has come a long way and is still considered one of the most effective & inexpensive tools of digital marketing. Any business that communicates with its consumers through emails should maintain a hygienic email list.

There is a saying, “We are what we repeatedly do,” and the same applies to your email hygiene habits. The more you maintain email hygiene, the better your results will be.

And if ignored, Spam folders become home to such emails.

So let’s learn how we can prevent that and ace email hygiene.

1. Horizontal & Vertical Consistency

The list in which you keep all the contacts and other related information is called the database. A database is usually prepared in Ms-Excel. This database should be well organized and updated.

You need to check the horizontal & the vertical consistency of the data. In simpler words, you should check the headings of the columns and tally the vertical data with the consecutive horizontal data down the excel sheet. For instance, there are three columns in your spreadsheet: name, company, and email ID. While checking the list, if you find that the email ID provided against a certain name does not match it, or the domain name is of some other company, you should double-check such data.

A well-maintained hygienic database reaches the right audience and increases the rate of conversions and audience engagement. But sometimes, processing bulk mails might be a tedious and overwhelming task. Hence, to reduce your workload, you can integrate email API. This will provide you access to different features & functions of the email platform and help establish a relationship with your customer.

2. Check KPIs

The only way to maintain & approve email hygiene is by checking KPIs [Key Performance Index(s)]. The KPIs of email marketing are –

• Emails Delivered: The number of emails delivered among the total number of emails sent.
• Click-To-Open Rate: The number of unique clicks to the number of opens gives the click-to-open rate.
• Bounce Rate: It shows the percentage of people who did not receive the email from the email list. The emails that bounce permanently (due to invalid email addresses) are called hard bounce, and the temporary bounces (due to any issue on the receiver’s end) are called a soft bounce.
• Unsubscribe Rate: This is the percentage count of the number of unsubscribed people from your content. These are the people who either do not find your content engaging or relevant.
• Click-Through-Rate (CTR): It gives the percentage count of the people who clicked on the link provided in the email.
• Spam Complaints: The audiences who lodge spam complaints are clearly not anymore interested in the content and should be immediately removed from the list.
• Social Shares: This is not a mandatory KPI, but it’s good to give a share button to your audience if your content is suitable for sharing on social media. Keep the sharing process simple & monitor further comments to the post.
• Forwards: This is an interesting KPI to have a record of. If your audience further forwards the email, it is an opportunity for you to expand your audience.
• Conversions: This is the most important KPI. You will be able to evaluate the success rate of the conversion when compared with your goal.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can maximize the conversion rate. It increases the chance of your audiences to convert to your customers by boosting sales & customer engagement.

3. Unresponsive Contacts

Email marketing is a method of communicating & establishing relationships with customers. To understand the customers’ response to the campaigns, we need to look at the KPIs mentioned above.

To identify the unresponsive contacts, we need to focus primarily on the number of emails opened and the contacts that have not opened it. On observing specific audiences’ interaction patterns for 60-90 days, you can conclude. It is better to remove such an audience from the database which does not open emails.

Although after a gap of 30-60 days, you can send them an auto-subscription mail. If they open it, then they will again get added to your list.

4. Frequent Audit of the Database

There is no exact frequency in which a database should be updated. It completely depends on the senders and how frequently they want to audit the database.

You must audit your database after every campaign. It keeps your database updated and ready for the next campaign. You can also update your list quarterly or half-yearly if you have a limited number of campaigns running.

5. Personalized Campaigns

This is the most underrated and challenging part of email marketing. While most companies desire to personalize each email for their target, it’s easier said than done.

The best practice you can adopt to keep your audiences engaged is to curate personal content for them.

Studies have shown it increases the CTR by 2.5 times and the conversion rate by 6 times.

Conclusion

To ensure your marketing campaigns do better and bring the desired results, follow the practices mentioned here. You’ll surely ace your email hygiene!