Even though the goal of having a mailing list is to get people to join your list, at some point you will need to clean up your mailing list and get it back into shape. This week’s blog post outlines when you should remove people from your mailing list and deleting contacts that no longer serve your business.
Open and Click Rates – If both your open rates and click rates are 0% this person is not engaging, or their email is no longer valid. Remove them from the list.
The only exception to this is when you first add an email to your list and haven’t sent that contact any newsletters. Both rates will be at 0 until you send them something and they interact with your email.
Unsupportive People: Delete emails for people who are un-supportive or unrelated people. They don’t have to deliberately be unsupportive or critics. An unsupportive person is someone who is not engaged.
An example of this can be old coworkers who would have attended when you worked together but would never now. This person may feel obligated to stay on your email list but doesn’t care for the newsletter or the information you are providing. Do the honors of removing this contact from your list.
Unsubscribed and Cleaned Mail– Mail Chimp and other email services will mark emails as unsubscribed or cleaned (meaning can’t send) but if you are managing a long list of these emails you may want to delete these types of emails. Free email services have caps on how many contacts you can have without paying for the service. Unsubscribed and cleaned emails taking up space and room in the number of contacts you can have. It’s unlikely that you will re-add the email and it’s not likely they will re-sign up.
Also if you notice if you have a lot of unsubscribers. This may indicate an issue with your methods. You want to rethink your email capture approach or email content.
Unknown Email Additions – Tags in Mail Chimp make it easy to label contacts and notes how you met the person or how you received the contact address. If you are unsure how you received the email address (and if they have little to no engagement) get rid of the address.
Repeated Bounces: When you keep seeing your email bounce, it is likely that you entered in the email address incorrect. One digit wrong and the email won’t send. This happens a lot when you ask people to write down their addresses and you can’t read their handwriting. Once you guess and try to enter in the address, one missed letter or number and the email won’t work. Delete these addresses that never reach the recipient.
Death – Unfortunately at some point you will have to remove emails because of death. It’s an unfortunate part of managing your list and a part of life.