This article was originally published in my Digital Tip-A-Month Newsletter. Sign up to get more tips like this in your inbox once a month.
Whether you’re mobilizing voters for the midterms, or gearing up for end-of-year fundraising, chances are you’re going to be emailing your list more than usual in the coming months, with new and higher level asks. That makes this the ideal time to spruce up one of your most important assets: your email list.
Email deliverability is tough these days, which means list hygiene is more important than ever before. Emailing people who don’t want to hear from you means you’re more likely to end up in the junk filters of people who do want your emails.
It may seem counter-intuitive to remove people from the list you built with your blood, sweat, tears, and money, but remember, not all email list members are created equal. If you can’t reach them, they have no value to you. If you can reach them, but they never open or interact with your emails, their value is quite low. And some bad email addresses can actually hurt your overall list. That’s why it’s worth taking steps to remove bad and inactive email addresses: doing some clean-up will maximize your ability to reach the people on your list who matter most.
There are a couple broad categories of “bad” emails to worry about:
Broken or non-existent email addresses – These can sneak onto your list through typos, malicious sign-ups, or simply the ravages of time as old addresses fall out of use. Your email service provider should automatically flag these as “hard bounces” and stop sending them emails, but if not, you should do so yourself. Mailing to these addresses regularly can get your messages flagged as spam.
Non-subscribed email addresses – It should go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: don’t send mass emails to people who haven’t opted in to your list. Don’t email people who’ve asked to unsubscribe, either. It’s bad manners, and it’s also illegal.
Inactive users – These are real email addresses, opted into your list, who never open or click on your emails, and never interact with your content. They don’t take action, they don’t donate. They’re dead weight. You might think: but at least they aren’t doing any harm, right?
But they might be. Email providers monitor how recipients engage with mass emails. Clicks and opens suggest good content, while spam reports suggest… well, spam. You want your spam report rate as low as possible, which means prioritizing sending to people who like your content and won’t ignore it. You could remove the dead weight from your list entirely, or keep them around but suppress them from most emails. Either way will help you reach more inboxes of people who are more likely to donate or get involved.
30 Minute Exercise
It’s easy to deal with those inactive users: stop emailing them. The fastest way to do that is to create a segment of these folks for use in email targeting exclusions.
The steps may look slightly different depending on your email service provider, but basically, you want to:
- Identify how many emails each supporter has opened. This might exist as a profile field, or an engagement factor, or a query parameter – each email tool is a little different.
- Decide what timeframe you want to consider “inactive.” If you send a lot of emails, this might be 6 months. If you email less frequently, it might be 12 months or more, though not much more. (If someone hasn’t opened an email from you in a full year, are they really likely to start doing so in the future?)
- Create a segment of people who have zero email opens within the timeframe you picked.
- Set that segment to auto-refresh on a regular basis.
- Going forward, exclude that segment from most or all of your emails.
Going Deeper
Rather than suppressing inactive addresses by default, you could send out periodic re-engagement emails. These emails ask, in a friendly way, whether the supporter wants to keep hearing from you. They can be opt-out requests (“we don’t want to bother you, so click here if you don’t want to keep receiving our emails”) or opt-back-in (“let us know if you want to keep hearing from us by clicking this link – otherwise, we’ll stop emailing you”). Either way, you’re giving people a nudge to control their own preferences – and by reminding them of the value you provide, you might just prompt them to start engaging again.
If you’re concerned about bad email addresses on your list, it can be worthwhile to do a list cleaning. A number of email list cleaning tools exist to help you identify and remove addresses that might be lowering your deliverability.