Start the Year Off With a Clean Email List

A clean list will improve your email reputation and deliverability

Happy New Year!  January – it’s always been a time for new beginnings and fresh starts so what better time to clean your list?  I promise list hygiene won’t take long and it will be mostly pain-free.  In the end, a clean list will improve your email reputation and deliverability.

First, you will want to separate your list into buyers and non-buyers, if you haven’t done this already. This is relatively easy; you’ll want to run a sales report for all your orders and give those people a buyer tag.  Everyone else will, of course, will get the non-buyer tag. I never suggest deleting any buyers, past or present as that history is important to keep.

Now, this next step is where you get into the clean-up.  First, you’ll want to run an email status report for all of your unsubscribes and hard bounces who DO NOT have the buyers tag.  (You don’t want to accidentally mark buyers for deletion.)  Take this list of unsubscribes and hard bounces and tag them “to be deleted”.

Finally, this next part is a little more painful. For many of us, it’s hard to delete anyone from our list.  The belief has always been the bigger the better.  But that’s what I want you to do – take everyone on that “to be deleted” tag and delete them.  Remember, a smaller engaged list is much better than a large unengaged one.

What I’ve outlined above is a basic clean up for your list hygiene.  In the next post, we’ll cover a second step that you can take to review the engagement from your list.  And how you can clean up your list even further. If you’re using Infusionsoft and need help tracking your email engagement, I highly recommend PlusThis. I’ve been using it with many clients and it helps to save time.

I’d love to know how this first step goes for you.  Feel free to comment below.