List Hygiene - The Most Underrated Way to Increase Your Open Rates

When it comes to newsletters, everyone wants to know how to grow. But the fact of the matter is that list hygiene is equally— if not more important than newsletter growth.

We can give you all the strategies you need to grow a newsletter to 10,000, 100,000, or even 1 million subscribers, but if these subscribers are not engaged, your open and click-through rates will plummet. 

This is where email newsletter list hygiene comes in.

It’s the process of cleaning your list of inactive or unengaged subscribers to ensure higher open and click-through rates. 

Benefits of Effective Email Newsletter List Hygiene

Having a clean email list is a high-performing media asset that gives you:

1. Improved Deliverability

The cleaner your list is, the more effective your emails will be. Having proper email list hygiene ensures you’re sending your content to the most engaged subscribers. If you don’t keep your list clean, you’re sending emails to people who aren’t interested in your content.

This affects your deliverability rates in a few ways:

1. Soft Bounce

You sent an email, but your subscriber’s mail inbox is full or inactive, so they don’t receive it.

2. Hard bounce 

You have an email list full of invalid or unengaged subscribers, so when you send an email, the mail server rejects it.

3. Spam

You send the email, but your subscribers don’t find it useful and mark it as spam. What are some spam words you should be aware of?
Here is a blog on +200 words that can trigger email tools to flag your email as spam.

If you don’t clean your list regularly, more of your emails will bounce or get flagged as spam. All of these actions will result in lowering your deliverability rates.

This means that over time, fewer people will receive your emails, even if they’re interested in them.

2. Increased Engagement

A clean email newsletter list is an engaged list. When you clean your email subscribers, you’ll see an increase in your open and click-through rates. 

Why? 

Because the remaining subscribers are more interested in your content.

They’re more likely to open and click on your emails. 

3. Higher Conversion Rates

A well-maintained email newsletter list comes with higher conversion rates. 

If you clean up your list, you actually keep your most loyal subscribers, removing all the people who are not as interested. So, it’s a lot more likely that the remaining subscribers will buy your products or services, given that they’re most engaged with your content.

Why Trust Me? Tanyo runs an email marketing agency that helps financial companies get higher engagement and make more sales from their emails. He also writes a weekly newsletter on beehiiv.

Best Practices for Email Newsletter List Hygiene

When it comes to list hygiene, there are a few best practices, such:

1. Using Double Opt-In

Double opt-in helps you verify your email subscribers. Are they actual humans interested in your content? Or are they bots that artificially boost your subscriber number? Double opt-in helps you figure that out. It requires subscribers to confirm their emails once they sign up for your list. 

Not sure if double opt-in is right for you? We wrote this article to help you choose the best fit for your newsletter - single or double opt-in.

2. Segmenting Your List

Segmenting your list is one of the best ways to keep your audience engaged. With beehiiv, you can segment your list based on subscriber behavior, interests, and demographics. 

This process will help you improve your targeting and engagement, ensuring that you’re sending the right emails to people who are meant to see them.

Also, by segmenting your list, you can see which subscribers haven’t unsubscribed but don’t open your emails. Then, you can create a re-engagement sequence targeted at that audience to see if they’re still interested in your content.

3. Purging Inactive Subscribers

The bigger your email newsletter list is, the more inactive subscribers you’ll have. 

There’s only one thing to do with them - remove them from your list. While you might find it stressful to remove subscribers you have fought tooth and nail to earn, it’s best to let them go. Inactive subscribers lower all of the important metrics you have to worry about (open rates and CTR.)

How do I scrub my email list?

Just follow the process shown in the YouTube video below.

By removing inactive subs, creators like Ian Vorbach of SpaceDotBiz consistently get over 50% open rates.

4. Monitoring Bounces and Complaints

Bounce rates and spam complaints are the two things that hurt your email newsletter list deliverability rates the most. Some bounce rate is inevitable because, over time, some subscribers will deactivate their emails. But if you notice that your bounce rate is over 2%, you need to clean up your list.

Also, if you see that your emails get flagged as spam by 0,1% of your audience, you need to clean up your list. In beehiiv, you can see how many people mark your each email as spam.

Email Newsletter List Hygiene Checklist

Here’s the four-step checklist that will keep your email list hygiene high:

1. Verify Email Addresses

An essential part of keeping a clean list is email verification. An effective way to do that is using double opt-in. Another way to verify your email addresses is to see if you get group or company subscribers. Examples include @support, @info, @companyname. 

These are not individual emails, so it’s likely that they won’t read your content regularly, so they won’t be as engaged.

2. Maintain Consistent Branding

One of the best things about building an email newsletter list is having direct access to your audience. You get to reinforce your brand daily/weekly/monthly to your audience, leaving them with a lasting impression. 

If you maintain consistent branding across your media assets (social media accounts, newsletter, site), you stand out from your competitors. Your audience will know exactly what you stand for and what they can learn from you. So make sure all of your messaging and media assets are consistent across all your media properties.

3. Provide Clear Opt-Out Instructions

It’s essential to allow your audience to opt out of your emails if they don’t find them interesting. This will help you avoid getting your emails marked as spam. 

A good way to do that is to add an unsubscribe button to your emails. beehiiv has a built-in unsubscribe preset that you can use in your emails.

4. Test Your Emails

Once you’ve prepared your email newsletter content, it’s time to do a final check. In the content editor on the right side, you’ll see a few options to do a final check. You can click on “Preview” and see how your email renders on mobile and desktop. 

If you want to be 100% sure that all of your images, GIFs, and content render properly, you can send yourself a test email to see how your emails look.

Automated Email Newsletter List Hygiene

If you have a large email newsletter list, it’s almost impossible to manually clean your list. This is where automation comes in. Here are a few automated ways to keep your email newsletter list hygiene high:

1. Use an Email Validation Service

An email validation service checks if the email address you’re sending your email newsletter to is valid. 

These services run your subscribers’ emails through different checks to see if these emails exist or if you can deliver to them.

2. Set Up Automated List Cleaning

With beehiiv, you can add automated triggers for unengaged subscribers. Then, you can either remove them from your list or re-engage them with fresh content. 

How often should you clean your email list?

Every 1-3 months is ideal. This would give you enough time to see which subscribers engage with your content.

You can set up a list cleaning automation that triggers every 1-3 months to ensure you regularly remove inactive or invalid subscribers.

3. Monitor Email Engagement

Using beehiiv’s automation tools, you can actively monitor email engagement. You get automated emails that show the engagement of your posts, so you can see if your engagement grows over time. This process allows you to see if you need to remove inactive subscribers.

It’s Time for an Email Newsletter List Clean-Up

We can’t understate the importance of having a healthy list when it comes to newsletters. 

What is a healthy email list?

A healthy list is an engaged list, and an engaged list helps you sell more products, services, or advertising slots. We help you analyze your audience, so you can see if it’s time to clean your list.

Segment your audience today, purge your inactive subscribers, and watch your open rates go through the roof with beehiiv.