How to clean a mailing list

How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed

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How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed

How To Clean A Mailing List Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed It is important to clean a mailing list – whether it is Getresponse or whatever autoresponder you are working with – once in a while. It helps to keep your deliverability, open rates and click rates high and at the same time reduces spam complaints and bounce rates. Also it will keep your monthly fees down, as most autoresponder companies will charge a fee depending on the amount of subscribers. The more people are subscribed to your list, the higher the monthly fee your autoresponder company will charge. But there’s no need to pay for subscribers that are unresponsive and never interact with you, right? That’s why it might be a good idea to clean a mailing list from time to time and get rid of subscribers that are not engaged. So far so good. But what most people recommend how to clean a mailing list is plain wrong. Putting the suggested methods to use could not just cost you valuable subscribers. It also could cost you money.

So, how NOT to clean a mailing list Most people recommend to search for subscribers that don’t open your emails for a certain period of time. You will need to combine it with the date range when the subscriber was added to your list, to not delete subscribers that were added just recently. © 2015 Torsten Müller -2-

How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed In Getresponse you would add the search condition ‘Message not opened‘ and choose the date range.

In Aweber you would search for ‘No Opens‘ and the date since when no opens were counted.

But this is totally wrong! Before I’ll show you the proof, let me tell you one example. I know of at least one subscriber in my list who never opened any of my emails, yet this subscriber generated approximately $100 in commission over the last 3 months. If I would have applied the above suggested method, I would have deleted this subscriber already and someone else would have made this commission. Need the proof? Watch this video. To understand why there is such a difference, let us have a look at how open rates are tracked.

How do autoresponders track open rates? To make a long story short, all autoresponders work the same way. There’s no magic attached to it. To track the open rate of an email, all autoresponder companies add a small tracking pixel to the body of the email. © 2015 Torsten Müller -3-

How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed Once an email gets opened the email client will download this tracking pixel. In theory. In practice there are too many outside factors that have an influence on this way of measuring the open rate that it is far from being accurate. For example just look at someone opening the email while not being connected to the internet. Or someone using an email client that blocks downloading of images. If you want to read more about how open rates are tracked I recommend reading Adrian Jock’s article ‘Little Know Facts About Email Open Rates‘.

So, how then to clean a mailing list? Let me show you an example using Getresponse, you can do it similar with other autoresponder services. Log in to your GetResponse account and click ‘Contacts’, then ‘Search Contacts’.

How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed You will come to the page where you can define you search. As you can see, in this account there are 1508 contacts in the moment. Click here on the ‘Advanced Search‘ link next to the search box.

Three different drop boxes will open that give you options to narrow down your search.

How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed

Make sure to select in the ‘autoresponder sequence‘ dropdown both options. This will search for all leads, whether they have finished your autoresponder sequence or not.

And in the last drop down box for ‘subscription date‘ you can choose the time when the subscribers got added to your lists. Important: I prefer to choose a date range that spares out the last 30 days or so. Whatever date range you choose here, you need at least give your subscribers some time to open your emails. Otherwise you could end up deleting a subscriber that just got added 5 minutes ago. © 2015 Torsten Müller -6-

How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed

Now we come to the fun part where most people get it wrong when it comes to search for people who didn’t open our emails. We need to add to search conditions and make sure that our results match ‘all‘ of them, and not ‘any’. We will add the condition ‘Message not opened‘ and also ‘Link not clicked‘, both for all message types, means autoresponders, newsletters as well as A/B test. For the date range we choose ‘Never‘.

Now we click the big blue ‘Show contacts‘ button down on the right.

How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed

On the left you can see the defined filters and still tweak them if needed. In our example Getresponse found 46 subscribers that never opened an email and also never clicked any link. On the top left side of the contact list you will find a check box that says ‘Choose all‘. Select this checkbox to check all listed contacts.

How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed

Once you selected all contacts, choose from the drop down field below the search results, what to do with the selected leads. You have the following options:

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Copy to campaign

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Move to campaign

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Remove from campaign

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Remove from account

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Send message

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Add custom field

From here you can decide what you want to do with these contacts. If you prefer to delete them straight away, you can either choose to remove the contacts from the campaign or from your whole account. But maybe you want to give them a last chance and try to re-engage them. This can be done with sending them a re-engagement message that offers for example a special discount or a coupon.

How To Clean A Mailing List – Get It Wrong And You’re Screwed You also can move these contacts to a dedicated campaign and send a series of reengagement messages.

Highly Recommended While cleaning your mailing list regularly you can maintain a higher open rate as well as click through rate. This in turns will help to keep your deliverability high. However, deleting your unengaged or non-responsive subscribers will increase the percentage of subscribers that open your emails, the average number of engaged subscribers remains the same. If you want to increase your open rate and have more people reading your messages regularly, I recommend having a look at Open Rate Explosion, which explains exactly how to do that.

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