It may seem like maintaining good email hygiene is a simple job for marketers to handle, but it may get difficult if they do not understand well how to maintain healthy habits, according to emailoversight.com.
What exactly is “email hygiene”?
Simply stated, email hygiene is the practice of maintaining an email list that is up to date, clean, and of the highest possible quality. Typically, this entails deleting records that are no longer functional or that are out of date.
In order to do this, marketers must first grasp the difference between a hard and a soft bounce in email campaigns. A hard bounce occurs when an email address is no longer function owing to the departure of a key employee from the organization. In the event of soft bounces, the email is still sent, but the system responds with a message such as “out of office” or “your email address is not recognized.”
Therefore, you wouldn’t have to worry about soft bounces in the first place. It is just those hard bounces that you will need to be concerned about since they are invalid routes to an organization. You’ll have to get rid of them since you’ll be paying per thousand emails sent if you’re using email marketing software. Receiving such hard records and bounces in your email list will save you from being flagged as a spammer by any spam filtering system.
The following are some indicators that you should address poor email quality:
- Winding up in the spam filter is a common occurrence.
- A significant amount of bounces
- Open and click-through rates that are too low
What is the significance of email hygiene at this time?
It’s always important to maintain proper hygiene, so why should you be concerned about it now, in 2021? Because of lockdown, it is more difficult to market to new consumers for a variety of reasons. They are unable to utilize their office phones for outbound telemarketing or to speak with a prospect they are nurturing in order to close sales.
Sending emails to individuals you know or who you anticipate getting a response from has long been considered good email etiquette. That includes retaining and nurturing your current clients, even any soft bounces you may still have left in your database. Lockdown has resulted in a greater emphasis on retention rather than acquisition, resulting in an immediate increase in the value of your email database.
Yet another reason why email hygiene may be pushed back to the forefront is due to the explosion of social media, which has resulted in sites such as LinkedIn being oversaturated with spam messages. As a consequence, marketers may be more likely to use email as a communication channel.
Aspects to take into consideration
1. Consistency on both the horizontal and vertical axes
When you store all of your contacts and other relevant information in one place, you name this list “the database.” A database is often created using Microsoft Excel. This database should be well-organized and kept up to date at all times.
You must ensure that the data is consistent on both the horizontal and vertical axes. To put it another way, you should double-check the column headers and add the vertical data to the horizontal data that follows it along with the Excel page.
2. Review key performance indicators (KPIs).
Checking KPIs [Key Performance Index(s)] is the only method to ensure that email hygiene is maintained and approved.
3. Contacts that are unresponsive
Email marketing is a technique of interacting with and building connections with consumers that uses electronic messages. We must examine the key performance indicators (KPIs) listed above in order to determine how consumers responded to the ads.
In order to discover the contacts who are not responding to emails, we must first look at the number of emails that have been opened and the number of contacts who have not opened them.