In fact, the number of successfully delivered emails is on the decline globally.Įmail scrubbing helps by cutting down on the number of subscribers who are annoyed enough to mark your emails as spam. This is a huge problem for all email marketers. Again, that significantly reduces the opportunity to get conversions, leads and sales from your email list. If there are too many, they’ll start sending your emails straight to the spam folder, skipping the inbox.Īnd they’ll do that for everyone you send email to, not just the people that reported you. The problem is that mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and others log spam complaints. Some subscribers mark your emails as spam because they don’t remember signing up, even if they actually did. And that improves your open and click rate percentages.īut if the same people are opening and clicking your emails, why does that percentage matter?Ĭleaning your email list also reduces the number of spam complaints. Even if the same people as before are opening your emails, they’ll now be a bigger percentage of the total emails sent. Open and click rates are calculated as a percentage of the total number of emails sent.Ĭleaning your email list means you’re sending emails only to those who are interested. A couple of the benefits of email scrubbing are simple math. Benefits of Email ScrubbingĮmail scrubbing can help turn that around.

That means you’re missing out on leads, sales, and revenue. If people aren’t opening and clicking, they aren’t converting. Here’s how you know you need to clean your email list:Īll of this adds up to one big red flag. Use our beginner’s guide to email marketing as a resource to help with that. While every list is different, if your open and click rates are way below average, then maybe you need to improve your email marketing practices. You may also want to look at email marketing benchmarks for your industry. If more people than usual are unsubscribing or reporting your emails as spam, then it’s another sign that an email list cleanup is due. If you’re using Mailchimp, you’ll find this by clicking the View Report button next to each campaign. Next, dig down into individual campaigns, and look at the unsubscribe and spam complaint rate. If there’s a pattern of declining open and click rates, you’ve got a problem. Take a look at what’s been happening over the last few email campaigns. When you login to your email marketing app, you’ll be able to see the open and click rate for your campaigns. How do you know when it’s time to clean your email list? You can usually see the first warning signs in your email marketing statistics. We’re going to use MailChimp in our examples, but the process is similar for most popular email marketing services. In this article, we’ll look at why email scrubbing is essential, and give you a step by step guide to doing it. This email list hygiene is an essential part of targeting your marketing, so you should do an email list cleanup at least a couple of times a year. What is email scrubbing? Email scrubbing is removing unengaged subscribers from your email list so that you can market only to people who want to receive your emails. Up to one-third of your subscribers will never open your emails, much less click on your call to action. If the answer is never, then you’re likely wasting time, effort, and money on marketing to people who aren’t interested in your business.Įmail lists decline by 20–30% every year. When’s the last time you scrubbed your email list?

Clean out email subscriptions