The Number One Reason Why List Cleaning Is So Important

It’s generally agreed that cleaning your list is important. But the explanations as to why don’t always make 100% sense. At least not to me.

For example, I was reading a well known blogger the other day (who will remain nameless) who wrote that you should remove all the bounced emails from your list to keep it clean.

Okay, that’s great. But why?

I understand that makes everything neat and tidy, but surely if you send an email to a bounced address then that person just isn’t going to get it.

Of course, it could potentially affect your mailing reputation but hey… isn’t your autoresponder supposed to be doing that for you anyway. After all, that’s why you pay them!

Alright, I’ll be honest I know the reason why. But that’s not the point. The point is that he didn’t explain it. If you’re anything like me then you’ll find it very hard to implement something just because somebody has told you to without any reasoning why.

So here it is, the number 1 reason why you should clean your list:

You WILL get penalised by Hotmail and other providers based on your emails response rate

What this means is that if you send out 10,000 emails to their users and only 100 people open them, then email providers take note of this.

Think of it as a quality score.

The more often this happens then the lower your quality score. The lower your quality score then the more likely your emails are spam and that means… they hit the junk folder not the inbox.

Email providers are now looking at open rates of mass emails across the whole of their network to determine how relevant the emails are.

That means that if you send out 10,000 emails and 3000 bounce, 6000 are unopened and 1000 are opened your getting a 10% open rate and a 30% bounce rate.

If you removed the bounced emails from your list, and everything else remains the same, you are now sending 7000 emails of which 1000 are opened for a 14% open rate.

Instantly your emails look more relevant and are more likely to be put into the inbox by the email providers.

And of course, there are side-benefits in terms of marketing such as you are removing people from your list who no longer want to receive your emails.