Email is a powerful marketing tool, but you’ll only get the best results if your database has clean data. Performing regular email list cleaning is an important part of email marketing best practices, and can help you troubleshoot problems like plummeting engagement rates or a high percentage of spam responses.

A clean list is critical to email deliverability, which is the percentage of emails delivered to a subscriber’s inbox. If a large percentage of your messages are rejected as undeliverable or marked as spam, Internet service providers will start to block or filter them. A clean list can also improve your email open and click-through rates, which are the percentages of subscribers who open your message to read it and click on one or more links within it.

Purging Your Email List: Email List Cleaning

To keep your email lists squeaky clean, you should have an established schedule for scrubbing your data and cleaning out inactive and invalid email addresses. Depending on how much data you have and the speed at which it grows, this can range from quarterly to every six months.

It’s also important to segment your email lists based on engagement levels, and remove hard bounces and disengaged subscribers regularly. Leaving disengaged subscribers in your database can lead to them reporting your emails as spam, which can damage your sender’s reputation and cause other email marketers to stop delivering your content to their subscribers. Using a platform like Kickbox, which offers advanced technology, GDPR compliance, and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, is a great way to sanitize your email lists and improve the performance of your campaigns.