#34. What Is Email List Cleaning And How To Do It | Podcast

Vira 0:00 

Today we will be talking about how to keep your list clean and tidy, how to keep it engaged, how to keep it happy. It’s probably not the most entertaining topic, not the most exciting topic, yet. It’s super, super important.

Alissa  0:36 

Hello. Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of Email Einstein. Vira and Alissa here, we are two email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium. We are super passionate about email marketing, and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world. We specialize in providing a premium, full service e commerce email marketing experience for every single one of our clients. Our service is tailored specifically for your business and is designed to help increase your online retail revenue by 20 to 50 that’s five zero, not one 5% we deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment, and that’s what we’re all about here at Flowium. And today’s episode is an interesting one. It’s not like a hot hot topic, but it’s one that we wish was more of a hot topic, because it’s crucial.

Vira  1:28 

So I totally agree with you, Alissa. Hey everyone. Today’s podcast is also a special one, because Alissa might have a baby very, very soon.

Alissa  1:42 

Anytime, so.

Vira  1:44  

Three of us on the podcast. That’s gonna be fun, yeah, but back to our podcast. So today, we will be talking about something just like you Alissa said, it’s probably not the most entertaining topic, not the most exciting topic yet. It’s super, super important. So today we will be talking about how to keep your list clean and tidy, how to keep it engaged, how to keep it happy.

Vira  2:27 

So here are some fun numbers, or actually not so fun, based on most industry benchmarks, the average good newsletter open rate, and we are talking about like, good, like solid open rate is 20% meaning that four out of five emails aren’t open. When you say like 20% you’re like, Okay, it’s not too bad. But for me, when I say like four out of five emails are not open, this is when it hits me, for some reason. Yeah, so basically, the vast majority of people you’re emailing aren’t going to read your email. And, I mean, part of this process is totally natural, just like with newspaper or magazine, if you people still remember what it is, it’s like, you know, like when you’re getting that cosmopolitan or something, I’m going back to my teenage years. I’m having, like, the major flashbacks now. So you are not reading each and every like article in that magazine, right? You may be just go through some headlines. You’re going through some pictures and stuff like that. So the same with emails, actually, people don’t open each and every of your emails, even when they are your like raving fans, for example, I really love emails from Magic Spoon, but even though I love them, I love Chubbies, I love Magic Spoon, but even though I love them, I only read probably, like 50% of them, like the most and by most part, unfortunately, like 80% of people do not open your emails because they choose not to read them. And yeah, for most part, is because a huge portion of the people on your email, they might not be interested in you anymore. I know it’s hard to it’s hard to hear this heartbreaking. It’s hard for very heartbreaking. But why keep emailing those people if they don’t want to hear from you, if they don’t want to open your emails. So it’s time to rethink the way you approach your email list hygiene. By cleaning your list and being very specific to who you email to, you’ll not only stop harassing your never openers, but you will also, you will also make sure that the right message is delivered to the right people, to people who actually want to hear from you. But before we go there, I know that we have a really fun Pro Tip of the Week and making me smile, tell us about it.

Alissa  4:53 

So the pro tip for this week is Don’t brag about your list size.

Vira  4:58 

So my goodness. Okay.

Alissa  5:01 

So sometimes we have clients come in, or you hear about brands and different e commerce owners, and they’re super excited about their email marketing, which is awesome. We are also equally as excited about email marketing, if not more, because that’s all we do. But it cracks us up when we talk to these e commerce owners and they brag about their list size. I have 500,000 subscribers on my list, and for us as email marketers, especially internally at flow, and we always kind of smirk when we hear this, because, yeah, that’s great. You could have a million email subscribers on your list, but how many of those people are actually opening your emails? That’s the thing that we’re we’re we’re wanting to know how many of those people are actually engaged. Just because you have a massive list does not mean anything. Quite frankly, the reason why I’m giving this as a pro tip is just so that if you’re listening and you resonate with that kind of bragging behavior, this podcast episode is definitely for you, because what we want to talk about is how to clean your list, but also it would be cool if you had 500,000 subscribers, if all 500,000 of those people were sent emails regularly and opened your emails, that is definitely something worth bragging about. But just because you have a massive list doesn’t really equate to successful email marketing. So make sure that you listen. Take some serious notes around how to clean your list, because this is so, so important, and it’s something that we find a lot of of our clients, and a lot of E commerce brands don’t really think about doing, and so now they’re paying for a huge list, and they’re wasting all their time emailing all these people, and they have horrible deliverability rates, and they’re not really making the money that 500,000 subscribers should be making them. So again, pro tip for the week, do not brag about your list size until after you’ve listened to this podcast episode and after you’ve cleaned your list. Then let’s talk about how big your list is.

Vira  6:49 

It’s a really good one, and that’s unfortunately so, so common. Yeah, when people come to you with this huge list and and you’re like, Yeah, but your open rate is like 5%.

Alissa  7:01 

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Vira  7:03 

Like, yeah, no. So why bother with list cleaning and all? I’m struggling with those, like eyes and ease in English so much because in Ukraine we have like one sound, E, it’s easy. And here you have like different letters.

Alissa  7:17 

It’s I, it’s, E.

Vira  7:20 

God, bless you native speakers. It’s so hard for us, like, seriously. Well, anyways, let’s go back to email list cleaning. Did I pronounce it correctly? No, probably, okay good.

Alissa  7:34 

You got it. You got it. Cleaning. Yeah.

Vira  7:37 

So regular list cleaning is a good practice in, in, in, like any email marketing program, like, regardless of what platform you’re using, just clean your list to avoid both unsubscribe and spam filters. But something that I’ve noticed, and it’s actually makes me smile every time, sometimes people think that unsubscribe is a good thing. It’s basically at first they think maybe like, hey, it’s almost like a good thing because my list is cleaning itself right. So that’s that’s how they think. And in a way, it is true, but a high unsubscribe rate can send off some smoke signals to spam filters and prevent your message from being delivered at all. So you should be really, really careful with that. And just as we mentioned already, yes, unsubscribe rates. They are natural. Maybe someone just like does not want to receive your emails anymore, because, I don’t know, they used to have a dog, and now they have cat, and your dog emails are not relevant to them. Or maybe they just, I don’t know, they found a better deal, or something like that, but be very, very careful. When those unsubscribe rates are getting too, too high, it can raise some red flags. Another big one why you should bother with cleaning your list, list is that it helps you avoiding spam. And I mean, this should be obvious, but in case, it’s not, when you are having too many spam complaints, it can have some very, very serious consequences. The worst case scenario that can happen to you is that your email service provider may shut down your email marketing account completely, your problem completely, and you can even get fined from by government, and I think it’s something like up to $16,000 on your spammer because you are violating the can spam act, right? That’s a big one. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that number. Obviously, it never happened to our clients, because we are, we are, like, super, super careful with that thing. But I know, I know some guy that I work with. So he has both his like product business that he runs with us, but he also has his like a personal brand account, almost like a blog. So his blog was suspended, his list was suspended, so he’s like, working really hard on getting the list back, but so guys be really careful. Yeah, really careful with.

Alissa  9:59 

People underestimate that stuff. Like, I mean, yeah, yeah. I’m like, there are consequences for what you do. So just.

Vira  10:05 

I mean, it’s so easy, it’s so easy to mess up. Like, no pressure, but be really careful with that thing. So yeah, so the biggest reasons are to keep your list neat and clean, is to make sure that you’re avoiding unsubscribes and avoiding spam. And the third thing, and it’s like a brownie point, or how they say to lower your monthly fees, actually, like many email service providers, they actually charge you by the amount of the contacts that you have on your lease. So why would you pay for your contacts that are not opening your emails at all, that don’t want to hear from you at all. So why would you bother, like, paying for them at all? So these are, like, the three biggest things. Now, how to clean your list, like, what are the actual steps? So we are doing it in four easy steps. We’ll try to run you through them. Obviously, it’s a bit like a technical topic, so go to our YouTube, we have a lot of good stuff regarding it. But let’s start from the step one. Alissa, what is the very first thing that we need to do when we’re talking about the list hygiene?

Alissa  11:10 

So the very first thing is identifying unengaged contacts. And there are a couple of different ways to kind of do this. So we’ll go through what we do here in house, and then also we have a kind of like a an unengaged versus engaged recommendation from Klaviyo as well. So for us here at Flowium, what we basically determine as engaged versus unengaged. An engaged subscriber is someone who has opened and or clicked through an email in the last 90 days. Now, with this engaged segment, we can, and we do, actually, as account managers internally, increase or decrease the engaged segment based on what we’re seeing the metrics to look like. So if you have a 90 day engaged segment, so these are people who have opened and or clicked through your emails in the last 90 days then, and if you have open rates that are consistently over like 30% or something nuts like that, then what we’ll look to do is we’ll look to start expanding very slowly and very carefully that engage segment on a month to month basis. So you’ll usually increase it anywhere between like 10 to 30 additional days. So for a client of mine, for example, we started off with 90 days engaged, and now we’re at 180 days engaged because the engagements been so high. And so we’re slowly but surely increasing that engaged segment. And then on the flip side, we have to do the same with the unengaged segment. So obviously, the engaged segment is someone who is engaged with your emails in the last 90 or X amount of days, and the unengaged as someone who has not done that. So the exact opposite, again, here at phloem, our benchmark for that is 90 days. We do work with different levels of days, again, expanding or decreasing those segments, but that is something that we actively do, and that engage segment is the segment that we are going to primarily send emails to because, again, those people are engaged. They’re in a segment, they’re in a list, they’re in a group of people who we know we can count on to open the emails, click through them, and then also potentially even make a purchase off that email. So that’s kind of the first thing with regards to identifying the unengaged contacts. Because for us, anyone who hasn’t engaged in the last 90 days is effectively unengaged, unless they fall into some other kind of segment, but that’s something that we’ll get get into a little bit later. For Klaviyo, what they do to identify unengaged contacts is again, similar to us, if a recipient hasn’t opened one of your emails in over six months and has not made a purchase, it’s likely that they’ve lost interest. So to avoid sending these contacts emails that they don’t open and consequently landing in the spam folder for clients like Gmail, then you would stop sending them your usual newsletter and instead try sending them a win back series to reactivate them. So Klaviyo takes it a little bit further in the sense of they wait six months, so 180 days, to determine if someone is engaged or unengaged. Effectively, the biggest thing with engaged versus unengaged is this, and this is something that, again, it’s heartbreaking to hear and like conceptualize as an E commerce owner, to think like, How could someone not be interested in me and my brand and what we sell? But the brutal, honest truth is, if someone has not opened, not even opened your emails in the last three months. Even more so in the last six months, it is extremely likely that they have zero interest in you.

Vira  14:28 

Isn’t it crazy short, like, period of time? What is like, three months in relationship with someone? It’s like nothing, no in E commerce world, it’s like, it’s like entire life.

Alissa  14:40 

It really is. So it’s short, it’s disappointing to hear. It’s upsetting, especially as a business owner, you put your life and soul into into what you’ve created your baby, you know, but it’s the brutal, honest truth, if someone has not engaged with your brand in the last three to six months, it is so likely that they have zero interest in you. And as my mom has always told us, my siblings and I, our whole lives, go where you are celebrated, not where you are tolerated. So put all. Yeah, it’s just a good life model.

Vira  15:10 

All of my clients. You are not tolerated people.

Alissa  15:16 

It’s a great life model, but it’s true. Don’t waste your time on these people who aren’t celebrating your brand, they don’t take pleasure in opening your emails, and if they haven’t in the last 90 to 180 days, they’re not going to unless you’re going to give them some crazy out of this world offer. Which takes you back to the idea of those unengaged subscribers. You want to think about how you’re going to win them back. So back in episode 29 we talked about really advanced segmentation. And we talked about two different win back segments, the ex high rollers and the ex enthusiasts. These are the primary kind of groups of win back people you want to focus on, to send a special campaign to that’s going to kind of bring them back into that engaged segment. But again, as we mentioned in that previous episode, don’t waste your time on these people. Waste a very small amount of time, but the people you want to focus on again are the people who are celebrating you, not the win backs who are just tolerating an email from you in the hopes that you’ll give them 50% off their next purchase. So with regards to the engaged versus unengaged subscribers, it’s really, really important to identify those people, because ultimately you’ll know who to spend your time on, but then you’ll also know, okay, who do I need to start looking out for to clean from my list, which I mean, basically takes us to step number two. So Vira, hit us.

Vira  16:29 

Yeah. So step number two, after you have identified your unengaged contacts, and by the way, this 90 days thing, it might be a bit different for you, if your customers journey is longer, if you are again selling mattresses.

Alissa  16:47 

Where the mattrasses company, where is the mattress company?

Vira  16:51 

It should be mattresses and socks. So, yeah. So it’s very much depend on your business cycle, but in the most cases, unfortunately, 90 days as the mark. So step number one, identify your unengaged contacts. Step number two, identify your hard and soft bounces. So what are bounce rates like? What is the soft and hard bounces? So bounce rates actually refer to the number of emails that are not able to be delivered for different reasons. So there are big two types of bounces, hard balances and soft bounces. So hard balances are basically, they basically happen when the email cannot be delivered due to some permanent reason. For example, someone gave you their fake email. I’m very much guilty of that. I use fake emails all the time when I know that I’m gonna get the discount, and hey, I don’t even need to give them my email. So fake emails misspelled happens to the best of us as well, and stuff like that. So basically, the permanent reasons why your email cannot be delivered. Now if you’re using Klaviyo, Klaviyo will automatically remove those emails that hard bounce, and Klaviyo will automatically suppress them from future sense, so it does not like affect your deliverability rates, your open rates and stuff like that. So this emails, they will be automatically suppressed. I’m not sure how other platforms like do that, but I’m pretty sure it should be something very similar to what Klaviyo does. Now, soft bounces is a bit different. So it bounces is always caused by some temporary reasons. For example, recipient had a full inbox, or maybe server being down momentarily, or stuff like that. Now, Klaviyo will automatically suppress those accounts as well after it bounces back seven times in a row, something that we do recommend. We recommend doing like internally at Flowium, while Klaviyo automatically suppresses those profiles seven consecutive times. We recommend to exclude emails that soft bounce more than four times from your campaigns. Yeah. So suppress them, delete them, you decide, but make sure to keep an eye on those bounce backs, because it’s obviously it affects your open rate and click through rate as well. So step number two, identify hard and soft bounces. Yeah. Alissa. Step number three, very interesting and yet very confusing. One for many, for many people, what is step number three?

Alissa  19:23 

And this is one that I’ve done so much research on, and I continue to continue to do research on, and I’m still like, I don’t have the answer. So it’s the nice thing about email marketing, and what we do is it’s just there’s such a huge learning curve, and you’re just constantly educating yourself and trying to figure stuff out and trying to understand so, yeah, it’s great. That’s why we love it. But step number three, identify spam traps. Every time I hear spam traps, it makes me laugh, because I think of like, trap music, like, you know, like the really, like, There’s a song called, yeah, there’s a song called Trap Queen that was like. A hit here in the US, and it’s like very out of my my realm of music. But every time I hear spam traps, I think of that song, which is ridiculous anyways. So what are spam traps? So spam traps are actually fake email addresses that live on the web for the purpose of finding people who may be illegitimately acquiring contacts. Okay, this is a lot, right? Because you’re like, Okay, who the heck? Like, who are these fake people, you know, like, who’s doing this? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for you with that. Where do they come from? Where do they go? Where do they come from? Cotton eye, Joe, I don’t know, but we do have a way to identify these spam traps. And we actually have a couple of segments that we create right off the bat when we start off with a new client internally here at Flowium, and one of them is spam trap accounts. So in reality, it’s actually impossible to identify specific email addresses that are spam traps, because this information is not publicized. There isn’t like, a spam trap, you know, phone book on the internet that you can just go, yeah, right. Spam trap.com where you type in the email Oh, it’s a spam trap. Great. Remove them off your list. But finding people who aren’t necessarily engaging with your brand and are potential spam traps is possible. Obviously, because spam traps are fake email addresses, they’re not really doing anything on your website, they’re not engaging with your brand, like in real life, like in a tangible way. So there’s a way to find what you would hypothesize to be a spam trap. So in order to do so, and like I mentioned, what you would do is create a segment of anyone who has never engaged with your brand. So an example of this would be people that haven’t clicked or opened an email, haven’t started the checkout process, haven’t placed an order, haven’t been active on your website, haven’t viewed a specific product, they haven’t opened support tickets, they haven’t left product reviews, or they haven’t forgotten their password in the past, anything like this. We know that makes us human. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the thing is, is, like, robots can only get so far, right? Because they’re robots. That’s why that little thing always comes up whenever you log in somewhere and it’s like, Please confirm you’re not a robot. Click on all the pictures that contain a bicycle, and you’re like, Oh my goodness. Like, I’m not a robot. I just want to log into my account. But in reality.

Vira  21:41 

They just remember Chubbies has this like such a fun little video where the guy dressed as a robot sits, you know, at the computer. Please confirm you’re not a robber. Confirmed the robot. I love this. I love this captchas, yeah.

Alissa  22:38 

So that that kind of stuff is what helps. It’s annoying. It’s really obnoxious for us as users of the World Wide Web. You know when you go on a websites, but those are things that separate us from spam traps. You know, us real people. So yeah, it’s not possible for a fake account or someone who’s not a person to take these very specific actions. So you create a segment that includes having to have done taken any of these actions whatsoever, and then you’ll get a list. Sadly, for the most part, you’ll find that that list is a lot bigger than what you want it to be. Unfortunately, it’s just the way that the digital world works. But because you’ve now kind of identified who these people are or who these non people are, you know, to not send to them. So at that point, once you have those spam traps identified, you would pretty much exclude them from every single campaign. Moving forward, what I’m starting to do with some of my clients is, just like a double check for clients who have really, really high metrics and really phenomenal deliverability, is I’m starting to include tiny, tiny, little segments of that spam trap segment, like little sample sizes of like 200 300 of those spam trap accounts into campaigns to see how they behave and if they continue to not be active, then I go ahead and suppress that small sample size, because now I’ve received double confirmation almost, that they are, for sure, not A person. They’re not engaging, and we can just get rid of them. But the next step, once you’ve identified your spam traps, and you know for real that they are spam traps, is suppress them, because there’s no need for you to have these fake, fake emails on your list. And even if you have 500,000 subscribers on your list, and you create a spam trap segment, and then you realize 400,000 of your subscribers are spam traps. Just suppress them like it’s it’s annoying, and you’re gonna see your list completely dwindle, but now you’re only spending your time and energy on again, real people and people that celebrate you, not tolerate you. So the spam traps thing, there’s so much information out there about it, I would strongly recommend doing as much research as possible, but the spam traps is one of those key things that a lot of our clients and a lot of E commerce owners who are focusing on email marketing tend to not really fully understand, and it makes or breaks you truly it makes or breaks you just make sure that you take some time out to figure out who’s a person and who’s not, because it’s. More real than what you think. So again, step number three, identify your spam traps.

Vira  25:04 

Yeah, you know what, Alissa? I just Googled spamtrap.com, and it’s actually for sale. The domain is for sale. Start, maybe.

Alissa  25:13 

Maybe that’ll be something. Maybe that’ll be our side hustle. We’ll find a way to identify spam traps, and then people can go onto our website.

Vira  25:21 

I think the biggest, one of the biggest mysteries of the internet spam traps.

Alissa  25:26 

Yeah, really and truly.

Vira  25:29 

Yeah. So step number four, and you, Alissa, just talked about it a bit, step number four would be to suppress those accounts, remove suppressed accounts. So what is suppressed and how is it different from like deleting emails, suppressing versus deleting so suppressing profiles keep their data in Klaviyo, so you are basically still having that contact on your list, but you cannot email them anymore. Why keeping them there? Well, first of all, you are not paying for a suppressed email. So you’re just like, having the guy there. But the most important thing is that you still have all of the information about their profile, so you still see, like, when they purchased like, what campaign worked? Well, what campaign didn’t work? It’s just for you, for the data collecting purposes. It’s a good thing to have, again, suppressed profiles, they do not count towards your monthly payment plan. Limits and suppressing accounts have all the data and suppressed profile can become unsuppressed if they somehow reengage. So for example, if they decide to sign up for your email newsletter again, or if they decide to, I don’t know, go through some of your landing pages and sign in to receive an offer. So they can still technically go back to your list. But you cannot do it yourself. You cannot just like, go and manually, like, make them unsuppressed, so they will have to initiate the unsuppression. So that’s that’s a big one. So step number four, remove those suppressed accounts. So suppress your hard and soft bounds, suppress your super unengaged customers, suppress your spam traps, and then remove them, or, like, suppress them.

Alissa  27:18 

Yeah, just suppress, suppress, suppress. Yeah, always. I’m sure you have this too Vira, where you have some clients who are like, just delete it all. And I’m like, hold, like, deleting is a very, very permanent thing. So unless you’re 100% okay with losing all that data, whether there’s a lot or a little, suppress, just suppress. So this last kind of tidbit, it’s not necessarily a step. We’d mentioned that we were going to stick to four steps on how to clean your list, and those are really the primary ones, but this is just kind of going back to something that we spoke about in episode 30, where we talked about getting a preference page set up. So one of the things to help with not necessarily cleaning your list, but not losing out on subscribers that have the potential to stick around is again, getting a preference page set up. So I’m not going to go into crazy amounts of detail, because again, we spent a whole episode, episode number 30, talking about this. But just to keep it straight and to the point, in case you missed the episode again, go back and listen. But a preference page is a web page that appears when a user clicks on the unsubscribe link in the email footer. What it aims to do is confirm the opt out, and it’s really your last chance as a brand to keep a subscriber from leaving your mailing list. So the biggest, I mean, the absolute biggest benefit of doing this is it gives your subscribers an opportunity to actually make their own decisions about the level of communication your company has with them. So this is something that if you don’t have in place, please, please, please consider putting this in place, because this will alleviate any potential problems that you could have with unengaged subscribers, high unsubscribe rates, different issues like that that are avoidable, the spam trap side of things like we can’t control the robots they’re out to get us, but But with regards to actual, real human people that are considering or have been engaging with your brand, this is a really good opportunity to implement something that will save face a little bit with them. So definitely think about it, but make sure that you check out episode number 30, if you haven’t just yet, because we go into all the details about how to get that preference page set up. So with that, you have.

Vira  29:35 

By the way, oh, sorry.

Alissa  29:37 

No, no, no. Go forward. Go forward. Go forward.

Vira  29:38 

I’m sure you heard us talking about it before, but if you ever, like, need to help with preference page, or if you don’t like, know where to start, check us out at flowium.com/preference, this is actually the service that we are offered to those who are in need, who need our help. So just like, go to that link. Will be linked in the description box and check it out.

Alissa  30:03 

Yeah, and it’s a very handy service, because the way that we do it is we really customize it and get it embedded into Klaviyo. So it’s not even something that you really have to be concerned about buying another platform, doing something else, whatever it is, it’s something that we create, customize, and then embed in Klaviyo for you. So it’s, it’s a no brainer, but crucial, crucial, crucial, crucial.

Vira  30:23 

That’s a good one. That’s a good one. So again, flowium.com/preference. Yeah. And guys, don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends. We have a lot of cool content coming very soon. So subscribe, share it with your friends. Share it with your E commerce circle, and yeah, and let’s connect.

Alissa  30:44 

Yeah, for sure. And guys, make sure that you’re here for next week’s episode. As you can tell, if you miss a week or you miss an episode, you miss quite a bit. So make sure that you don’t miss anything that’s coming up. Because, yeah, no, no pressure, because this year, we’re trying to get as informative as possible, and really get a feel for what our clients are asking us. So then that way, we can kind of report back out to everyone who listens. We want to, we want to add value to your lives when it comes to e commerce, email marketing, and so make sure that you don’t miss any episodes. But next week, we are actually going to be talking about how to measure the success of your email marketing, and also go over the monthly reporting that we do internally here at Flowium, this is a really big one, and it’s a big question that we get, because people think they’re doing well, but they’re not sure. They don’t know how to measure it. Okay, what my open rates are x, but my click through rates are y, and I’m only making X amount of money. Like, what does this look like? Am I doing this right? So we’re going to go over all of that next week, so make sure that you come back to listen in and get an idea of whether you’re doing well with your email marketing.

Vira  31:45 

Yeah, come back next week, and thanks for listening.

Alissa  31:48 

Thank you guys so much. We’ll see you next week.

Vira  31:50  

See you next week. Bye.