How often should you clean your email lists?
Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2025 7:02 am
Answer: As often as you can.
You can start as early as three months, but if you have a large list and have never done an email list cleanse, now is the time to start.
The faster your list grows, the more often you need to clean it.
Before you start cleaning your list, check for hard and soft bounces.
There are two types of bounces in email graphic design email list marketing: soft and hard.
A soft bounce indicates a temporary delivery problem. Your postal service should try to send the letter again, and it will most likely be delivered.
However, hard bounces are bounces that never go through. The email address is invalid, the domain no longer exists, or the email server has blocked delivery.
Many email service providers will automatically purge hard bounces. Others force you to initiate an email list cleanup to get rid of the addresses.
Send a follow-up email campaign targeting inactive subscribers
Before you clean up your email list, you may want to segment subscribers who have become inactive. They don't open or engage with your emails, but they once did.
Send them a follow-up email campaign to bring them back. In the first email, ask if they still want to hear from you.
Allowing you to click "yes" or "no" buttons simplifies the process.
Remove subscribers who click “no” and attract those who click “yes” back to your business by providing valuable information, incentives, and discounts. Bring them back into the sales funnel to increase the likelihood of them converting later.
Top Tips for Cleaning or Scrubbing Your Email List
Top Tips for Cleaning or Scrubbing Your Email List
If you've never tried cleaning out your email list, now is the time. We've rounded up my best tips to ensure you're doing the hard work.
1. Start cleaning out your most active email lists, but don't forget about your other lists, too.
Always start with active lists—the ones that hear from you regularly. If you've followed our advice and segmented your list, you may have several separate lists, so work through them systematically.
2. Start cleaning duplicate email addresses.
People often forget that they signed up for a newsletter. Then, when they visit the website again in the future, they sign up a second time.
Remember what we said about ROI? Duplicate email addresses will reduce your ROI. Remove duplicates to avoid sending duplicate messages and to keep your email list from becoming oversized.
3. Find spam email addresses and remove them from your email list.
You probably already know how to spot a spam email address. Even as a consumer, you probably receive many emails from a spoofed address.
The following random, imaginary examples offer some insight:
mb2kl6v1f2@gmail.com
apple@apple.com
guess@aol.com
However, you don't have to do this manually, as we'll discuss later. Automatically removing spam or fake email addresses can make email list cleaning much more effective.
4. Remove people who unsubscribed from your mailing list
This is important. If someone tells you they don't want to hear from you, respect that request as soon as possible.
It's like those annoying phone calls. You told them you didn't want them to call, but they still do it.
Would you ever buy the product associated with this telemarketing call? Of course not. Even if you decide you like the product and pay millions of dollars for it, your principles may keep you from handing over the money.
People feel the same way about emails that come from a company without their consent.
5. Correct obvious typos
Often typos can be found manually in a list of email addresses if it is short enough. For example, it is quite easy to correct @gmial.com to @gmail.com. Same with @outlok.com to @outlook.com.
You can start as early as three months, but if you have a large list and have never done an email list cleanse, now is the time to start.
The faster your list grows, the more often you need to clean it.
Before you start cleaning your list, check for hard and soft bounces.
There are two types of bounces in email graphic design email list marketing: soft and hard.
A soft bounce indicates a temporary delivery problem. Your postal service should try to send the letter again, and it will most likely be delivered.
However, hard bounces are bounces that never go through. The email address is invalid, the domain no longer exists, or the email server has blocked delivery.
Many email service providers will automatically purge hard bounces. Others force you to initiate an email list cleanup to get rid of the addresses.
Send a follow-up email campaign targeting inactive subscribers
Before you clean up your email list, you may want to segment subscribers who have become inactive. They don't open or engage with your emails, but they once did.
Send them a follow-up email campaign to bring them back. In the first email, ask if they still want to hear from you.
Allowing you to click "yes" or "no" buttons simplifies the process.
Remove subscribers who click “no” and attract those who click “yes” back to your business by providing valuable information, incentives, and discounts. Bring them back into the sales funnel to increase the likelihood of them converting later.
Top Tips for Cleaning or Scrubbing Your Email List
Top Tips for Cleaning or Scrubbing Your Email List
If you've never tried cleaning out your email list, now is the time. We've rounded up my best tips to ensure you're doing the hard work.
1. Start cleaning out your most active email lists, but don't forget about your other lists, too.
Always start with active lists—the ones that hear from you regularly. If you've followed our advice and segmented your list, you may have several separate lists, so work through them systematically.
2. Start cleaning duplicate email addresses.
People often forget that they signed up for a newsletter. Then, when they visit the website again in the future, they sign up a second time.
Remember what we said about ROI? Duplicate email addresses will reduce your ROI. Remove duplicates to avoid sending duplicate messages and to keep your email list from becoming oversized.
3. Find spam email addresses and remove them from your email list.
You probably already know how to spot a spam email address. Even as a consumer, you probably receive many emails from a spoofed address.
The following random, imaginary examples offer some insight:
mb2kl6v1f2@gmail.com
apple@apple.com
guess@aol.com
However, you don't have to do this manually, as we'll discuss later. Automatically removing spam or fake email addresses can make email list cleaning much more effective.
4. Remove people who unsubscribed from your mailing list
This is important. If someone tells you they don't want to hear from you, respect that request as soon as possible.
It's like those annoying phone calls. You told them you didn't want them to call, but they still do it.
Would you ever buy the product associated with this telemarketing call? Of course not. Even if you decide you like the product and pay millions of dollars for it, your principles may keep you from handing over the money.
People feel the same way about emails that come from a company without their consent.
5. Correct obvious typos
Often typos can be found manually in a list of email addresses if it is short enough. For example, it is quite easy to correct @gmial.com to @gmail.com. Same with @outlok.com to @outlook.com.