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How often should you clean your email list?
Cleaning your email list is essential for maintaining good email deliverability, engagement rates, and sender reputation. How often you clean your email list depends on the size and activity of your list, but here are some general guidelines:
1. Quarterly (Every 3 months)
- Best practice: Regular cleaning every 3 months ensures that your email list remains engaged and free of inactive or invalid email addresses.
- What to remove:
- Bounced emails: Hard bounces should be removed immediately. Soft bounces may be removed after several attempts (typically 3-5).
- Inactive subscribers: People who haven’t opened or clicked your emails in the last 6–12 months.
- Unsubscribes and spam complaints: These should be immediately removed.
2. Monthly (for large or high-traffic lists)
- For higher activity: If you send emails frequently (e.g., weekly newsletters or promotions), cleaning your list monthly can be beneficial. It helps keep the list fresh and ensures you’re targeting the right audience.
- What to remove:
- Same as quarterly, but with a more immediate focus on engagement metrics.
3. After every major campaign
- Tailored cleanup: After sending a big campaign, especially one that might have been sent to a larger portion of your list, review the engagement and remove subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked any of your emails in a while.
- Use segmentation: Segment the unengaged users and try re-engagement campaigns before removing them.
Additional Tips:
- Segment before cleaning: Instead of just deleting inactive users outright, consider re-engagement strategies like sending targeted campaigns with special offers to encourage them to re-engage.
- Monitor engagement metrics: If your open rates or click-through rates start to drop, it’s a sign your list might need cleaning.
Regular email list hygiene helps to improve your sender reputation, reduce bounce rates, and increase open rates over time.
