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Hi Community! Happy Post-BFCM season.

 

Cleaning your email list is among the most important tactics you should do to maintain a healthy marketing program. In my experience, most brands prefer to clean their list in Q2 or Q3, when sales cycles might be lower, or in preparation for the Q4 holiday push. 

 

Another great time would be right after the holiday season. 

 

During the holiday push - BFCM (Black Friday/Cyber Monday) and December - brands often expand their regular “active” segments to a broader range to try and engage lapsed or churned customers in hopes that those contacts may return to make a new purchase when prompted with an incredible offer.

 

While customers are conditioned to receive an increased number of emails, the inbox service providers (ISPs) also expect the influx of messages and seem to tolerate it enough without penalizing the brand’s email reputation for breaking best practices*. You can also use this opportunity to weed out invalid addresses via bounces, given the increased volume of emails sent and increased engagement from active subscribers. 

 

With so many messages sent, using your holiday campaigns to identify unengaged subscribers is a cheap, low-effort approach to cleaning your list. 

 

On the flip side, during the holiday season, businesses often see a spike in new subscriber acquisition driven by other online channels where users seek special holiday discounts. While this increase in subscribers helps offset the unengaged contacts, it also increases the potential for invalid, fake, or threat addresses to find their way onto your list. 

 

Because of this, running your database through a proper list hygiene provider before the end of the year ensures any new addresses are valid and safe for you to send.

 

Between the engagement (or lack thereof) of your holiday campaigns and new email acquisition, you can create several segments and access valuable insights that you can use to strategize your marketing for the New Year. 

 

Stay tuned for Part 2 on what to do with these segments after your post-holiday list cleanse!

 

*While these are recommendations, you should maintain caution and apply reasonable segmentation to ensure the health and reputation of your email program. For example, if you commonly send to 90-day engaged segment, you would not want to mail every contact on your list; rather, you might expand your segment specifically for BFCM to 365 days engaged. These recommendations do not guarantee good deliverability, and you should assess what is the right strategy for your business. 


 

-Bryan Richey (@In the Inbox)

 

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Hi @Mailbox Manny 

Great! I hope it’s helpful. I always recommend AtData (formally Fresh Address). Their process is very robust and their reporting is detailed. They can be a little more expensive depending on the number of records you want to validate, but based on the two points above, it’s worth it.

Let me know if you have any other questions. I’m happy to make an introduction to my contact there if you’re interested!

@In the Inbox 


running your database through a proper list hygiene provider before the end of the year ensures any new addresses are valid and safe for you to send.

 

This is gold, great tip!  @In the Inbox do you have recommendations on a provider to check your list hygiene?


Cleaning your email list is an important part of maintaining and growing a successful email marketing strategy. Doing it regularly, especially after the holidays, can help you maintain accurate and up-to-date information, improve deliverability, and increase engagement with your audience.


Cleaning your email list is an important part of maintaining and growing a successful email marketing strategy. Doing it regularly, especially after the holidays, can help you maintain accurate and up-to-date information, improve deliverability, and increase engagement with your audience.

Furthermore, is crucial to the success of your email marketing campaigns. A clean email list can improve the deliverability of your emails, meaning that more of them will reach your subscribers’ inboxes and fewer will be marked as spam. This in turn can increase your open rates, as subscribers are more likely to see and open emails that arrive in their inboxes. Additionally, sending emails to a clean list can help ensure that you are only reaching active and engaged subscribers, rather than sending emails to outdated or invalid addresses.


How you approach list cleaning? Do you use profile maintenance functionality and delete inactive profiles totally or maybe you create separate segment of inactive customers.

Also how you defined inactive customers, this is my definition:

 


Isn’t this a moot point if you have auto win back, and auto sunset flows active to manage this? Clean your list shouldn’t be manual, in my opinion, unless you had a major influx due to a huge product launch that has people subscribing that may not be in the region required to buy the item. Again, your automation should catch this if the subscriber is not interacting with the emails etc.


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