How To Clean A Dirty Email List

Recently, I had a new client who wanted to dabble in email marketing. Their goals were fairly basic and involved a monthly newsletter and two automations: a welcome series and an abandoned cart series.

Part of their plan was to let their current list of customers (roughly 2,000 contacts) know that they were going to start sending email newsletters.

This is a good strategy.

You shouldn’t start sending newsletters to contacts with no context. You should let them know that you’ll be sending newsletters every X times a month, and you should give them a chance to opt-out.

However, when the client sent me their list of contact, I realised that that list of ~2,000 was probably a list of ~1,000…tops.

The list itself had columns for first name, last name, email, phone number, and physical address — those are all good bits of information to have. The issue was that many contacts didn’t have all that information filled out. Some had first names, some didn’t. Some had last names, some had first and last names combined in the same column. Things were messy.

Additionally, some of the emails looks spammy or fake.

Long story short, I knew I needed to clean up this list prior to sending out any emails.

How to clean an email list

Cleaning an email list is a five step process. I’ll outline each step below.

1. Verify the email addresses

We use Neverbounce to clean email lists.

For those who aren’t familiar with Neverbounce, it’s a very inexpensive service that verifies if an email address is valid or not. Sometimes an email is invalid because something is spelled wrong, other times an email is invalid because it doesn’t exist or was shut down by its owner.

There are many reasons why an email may be invalid, what’s important is that Neverbounce detects those invalid emails because you try to send content to them and destroy your sender reputation.

All you have to do to verify an email is upload a spreadsheet of email addresses to Neverbounce, click a couple of buttons, and voila!

2. Complete your spreadsheet

Yes, this is a tedious task that involves someone going through each row and inputting as much information about that contact as humanly possible. But I promise that if you take the time do it this step correctly, it will pay dividends down the road.

My suggestion would be to sync your CRM with your email marketing service of choice so that all your customer data gets cleaned at once.

Once this step is complete, you can begin using merge tags like “First Name” and “Company” to send more personalised emails to your contacts.

3. Segment your email list

Find a way to segment your list. Common segmentations are geography, industry, and age range. Find 3-5 segmentations (or more depending on the size of your list and how many data points you have) that make sense for your business.

Once you’ve segmented your audiences, start sending each segmentation emails that are most relevant to them.

The purpose of this exercise is to send highly relevant information to a niche within your audience so that your emails get great engagement. This will signal to your email marketing service that your contacts want to open, read, and click on your emails, thus increasing your sender reputation.

According to Mailchimp:

If you fail to segment and even 0.5% of your list marks your emails as spam or junk, there’s a high likelihood that your account (and IP address) will earn a strike, suspension, or expulsion from sending marketing emails.

4. Send emails in segmented batches

If you segmented your list into four categories — age range, geography, industry, and income range — send individualised emails to those lists one day after another.

This way, if one batch of sends gets flagged for high bounce rates or abuse, you don’t run the risk of your account a strike against it.

5. Send follow-up email to those who engaged

You can do this as an automation using if/then logic, or you can further segment audiences manually after you’ve sent your first campaign, but my next bit of advice is to follow-up with those who engaged (E.g. clicked) with your last email.

If a contact engaged once, it’s more likely they’d engage again versus a contact who’s never engaged before.

This follow-up email is a doubling down on your chances to get awesome open rates and click rates