A key component for effective email deliverability requires establishing and maintaining list hygiene on targeted email contact lists. List hygiene ensures the removal of inactive email users, thus ensuring the targeted emails are delivered to the respective audiences.

How do we ensure list hygiene for email deliverability?

The following are essential steps for maintaining a clean email list and getting your message into inboxes:

  • Validate your list: if the list hasn’t been actively maintained, using a validation service will be a quick way to get the list back in order. There are many services available to scrub your contacts from known spam traps and addresses that are no longer valid, including SparkPost Recipient Validation.
  • Get Rid of hard bounces: hard bounces are non-existent emails. Thus, it is necessary to eliminate them to create space and resources for delivering emails that may be delivered to users. 
  • Separate active subscribers from inactive subscribers: separating active from inactive subscribers is essential in determining the optimal way to deliver content to users. Active subscribers frequently open your emails, meaning they like/ tolerate content delivered by you. However, inactive subscribers rarely open your emails, thus the need to reestablish strategy to deliver content to them.
  • Establish a mechanism for frequent removal of unsubscribed emails: users that unsubscribe from your emails don’t want to see your content. Thus, they should be removed to create room for users that may be interested in your content.
  • Choose to use the opt-in method for the email subscription: an opt-in method ensures that only users interested in your content subscribe to your email contact list.
  • Strive to re-engage the inactive groups: reestablish a strategy to strive at re-engaging inactive subscribers to determine whether they are interested in viewing your content or not.

Next Steps

List maintenance is essential for effective email deliverability. However, it is not fully effective without implementing other email deliverability strategies, including having deliverable content. To author better content, learn how content impacts getting into inboxes.

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