4 Warning Signs It's Time to Scrub Off Your Mailing List

Is it time to get out your cleaning supplies? It might be.

First of all, well done. You've put in the time and effort to grow, employing all the best practices to expand your email list. For an expanding business, a list of email subscribers is a valuable asset. The impulse is often to gather as many contacts as possible and build a long list of people ready to receive your email campaigns and newsletters.

Long email lists are good, and yours is one of your most valuable assets. But over time, your list can become cluttered with inactive or invalid email addresses, harming your deliverability metrics. If your engagement and open rates are low, an enormous mailing list is doing you no favors.

To ensure your campaigns actually reach that long list of yours, it’s important to optimize your strategy for customers’ actions–but to do this, the state of your mailing list is vital. Is it in good shape? Or is it clogged up with dead wood?

Giving your list a good spring cleaning can be advantageous. But how do you know it's time to scrub off your email list? We’ll look at signs to watch out for, why it’s important, and how to go about it.

What Does It Mean to Scrub a Mailing List?

Scrubbing a mailing list means removing inactive or invalid email addresses from your database. This includes recipients who don’t open, don’t read, and don’t interact with your emails.

Although it might sound alarming to delete contacts you have invested time and money in gaining, removing these contacts ensures that you're only sending emails to people who are interested in hearing from you and who are likely to engage with your content.

Why Is Email Scrubbing Important?

The short version? Engaged subscribers don’t see your messages as spam, and you get a far bigger return for your efforts. A more active subscriber list will give you more quality interaction, and therefore, better consumer data. This will help you better tailor and target your genuine customers and followers.

Scrubbing off your mailing list regularly should be part of your customer lifecycle management process. It’s a vital step in giving your marketing campaigns a fighting chance of working their magic for your brand. Tidiness matters, and regular email scrubbing can help with all of the following.

Improved Deliverability

When selecting your email platform, you likely compared the deliverability rates of major services. We take pride in beehiiv's best-in-class deliverability and dedicated team of deliverability experts, but some necessary maintenance still falls to you. When you send emails to inactive or unengaged subscribers, it can hurt your sender reputation and increase the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam.

Better Engagement Rates

Sending emails to uninterested subscribers leads to low engagement rates, which can affect both deliverability and your chance to build your newsletter community.

As for marketers, email marketing impressively yields a potential return on investment of 42:1. But there's no percentage in sending brand messages straight to your audience's trash or spam folder.

Compliance with Regulations

Many countries have laws that require businesses to obtain consent from individuals before sending them marketing emails. Even scrupulous marketers can wind up with accidental inclusions to be purged by a good list-cleaning.

Cost Savings

Just like using a cloud phone service from Dialpad, that connects all of your communications together, scrubbing your email list can be cost-saving and efficient.

Many services charge based on the number of subscribers on your list. By removing inactive or unengaged subscribers, you can save money on subscription fees and focus on targeting those who are more likely to convert.

Even beehiiv, which doesn't incrementally tax your success, has a couple of hard limits built into its different plans. Yes, you get additional features with each, and most members of our community choose to level up to our Growth or Scale plans well before it becomes an issue. But we don't want you to run into limits before you're ready—when your impressive numbers simply reflect impressive success.

Another key benefit is that your marketing ROI will be far healthier. You won’t be paying to send your costly and well-crafted content into an email abyss. Rather, you will hit the bullseye by reaching engaged subscribers–and, potentially, new paying customers.

When Should I Clean My Email List? 4 Warning Signs

You should clean your email list at regular intervals to keep things running well. Here are some signs that you're due for some serious scrubbing:

Low Open Rates

If you notice that fewer people are opening your emails than usual, it could be a sign that some of the addresses on your list are no longer active. Visibility is everything when marketing a business. Unopened emails mean your messages are going unseen.

A big drop in open rate and a drop in click-throughs are both signs to note. This happens for various reasons, and small fluctuations in click-throughs or open rate aren’t always a cause for alarm. You might, for example, need to check that the content is a good match for your subscribers or that you need to search OnlyDomains for website names that express what you’re about more clearly.

Nevertheless, a sustained drop in open and click-through rates is a warning sign that your subscriber list needs a thorough overhaul.

High Bounce Rates

A high bounce rate indicates that many of the emails on your list are no longer valid. This can hurt your sender reputation and make it harder for future emails to reach the inbox.

Some bounce is unavoidable; an email address can be deactivated or may be incorrect in the first place. Inboxes can also fill up and reject incoming mail. Bounces for these reasons aren’t the main concern–although keeping on top of subscribers who have suddenly become inactive or unresponsive for whatever reason is important.

But a bounce rate that edges over two percent shows that your mailing list needs to be scrubbed.

Apart from the email not achieving its aim, bounce can also affect your standing with your email service provider. Some service providers penalize senders, giving them a low sender score for having a high bounce rate. This could impact your business’s future campaigns because your emails could automatically get directed to your mailing list’s spam folders.

Spam Complaints

If you're receiving more spam complaints than usual, it could be because some of the people on your list didn't opt-in or have lost interest in hearing from you.

Nobody likes spam; many recipients will complain if they receive too much. Marking your messages as spam is the strongest indicator you can get that a subscriber needs to leave your list. You must delete subscribers who are spam complainers. The number of subscribers who complain about spam is an essential marketing metric that should not be ignored.

As with bounce rate, spam can impact your standing with internet service providers. Spam complaints are used to get a picture of the quality and relevance of your content. Too much spam and your emails may automatically end up in the junk folder, leaving your sender score to plummet.

If you're struggling to keep track of which contacts are engaging with your emails, consider using an optimization tool. These tools can help you monitor your email campaigns and identify which subscribers are active, so you can focus your efforts on engaging with those who are most likely to respond. This is especially useful if you have a large email list and find it difficult to manually track engagement levels.

Inactive Subscribers

If someone hasn't engaged with any of your emails in several months, they may no longer be interested in hearing from you. You might want to look into discovering how to track email opens in Gmail or any other major email provider. From here you can set about removing these inactive subscribers, to help improve your average engagement rates.

Can You Re-engage?

With subscribers who don’t engage, it may not be the end of the line for their presence on your mailing list. It is possible they don’t dislike your brand; they might just need better or more tailored content.

Before scrubbing, it’s always worth trying to re-engage email subscribers with encouragement, such as discounts or other perks. Always ask if subscribers want to be removed from your list before scrubbing. A lack of interaction on their part may be for reasons you hadn't anticipated or it may be an oversight on their part.

For example, maybe you have a great enterprise microservices architecture solution that can really help businesses. However, if your subscribers don’t understand what this means or what it is, you’re going to struggle to get people to engage. So, consider appealing to these issues in your emails and seeing how you can improve.

Finally, always make sure that subscribers have the tools and instructions to unsubscribe themselves. These should be clearly set out in your marketing emails.

How Do You Scrub a Mailing List?

Scrubbing your list is more like cleaning a room than disinfecting a clear countertop. The latter only requires a vigorous spray and wipe. (At least, I hope so. I'm a better digital housekeeper than a cleaner of physical spaces.) But rooms become messy in multiple ways that require multiple approaches. You have to pick up the clutter, sweep, mop, dust, etc.

As for your mailing list, you want to:

• Remove long-inactive subscribers

• Verify email addresses

• Remove bounced emails

• Segment subscribers for better targeting

If you have loads of contacts and want to save yourself some time, you can use an email verification service to check for typos or invalid email addresses.

How Do I Scrub a List In beehiiv?

Still not sure where to start? No problem — we've got you. Here are the steps to scrubbing your email list on beehiiv.

Step 1: Remove Bouncers

Start with the easy wins. Check for any subscriber emails that have gotten bouncy. You can console yourself with the knowledge that they may still love you — but from another account.

Step 2: Identify Disengaged Subscribers

Use beehiiv's segmentation tools to see a full list of contacts who haven't opened or clicked on any of your emails in a while.

Step 3: Segment Your List

Once you've identified disengaged subscribers, segment them into a separate list. This will make it easier to give them one more chance to take your calls — and then remove them if you're still getting sent to voicemail.

Step 4: Send a Re-Engagement Email

Try sending re-engagement campaigns to see if you can win people back. Keep your message short and sweet. Craft a subject line that acknowledges the fact that it's been a while since you've connected. In the body, you can ask if they're still interested in receiving your newsletter and have them opt in anew if they are.

There's nothing wrong with a little bribery. Sometimes all it takes to win back an inactive subscriber is an incentive. Offer them something valuable, like a discount code, free trial, or exclusive content.

Step 5: Remove Inactive Subscribers

If people still don't respond after your re-engagement email, it's probably time to part ways. Remove the contacts lingering on the inactive list.

Step 6: Repeat Regularly

Set a schedule for yourself to review and scrub your email list every few months.

Get Sudsy

There you have it — the reasons that scrubbing is important, signs it's overdue, and the basic cleaning process.

Now it's time for you to practice what we preach. Roll up your sleeves and get ready to scrub. Then you can turn your attention to other deliverability best practices to make sure you never find yourself slammed as "spam" again.