If you are using email marketing to connect with your target audience and advertise your products and services, one of the main best practices involves keeping your email list clean or verified. This refers to the process of checking your email list to ensure that you are still sending emails to real people who are going to be seeing, opening, and reading your emails.
How Do I Clean My Email List?
Spending some time verifying emails and cleaning up your email list is an important part of the email marketing process.
Doing so will ensure that your messages are reaching the intended recipient and providing an opportunity for engagement and sales. On the other hand, failing to perform email verification checks and regular email list cleaning could actually harm your reputation.
One of the main ways that this can happen is if your emails are listed as spam too many times because they are going to the wrong addresses.
How to Clean Email List for Free?
While there are tools available that offer to verify and clean your email list for free, bear in mind that these might not always be the best choice for your business.
This is because these companies have to make money from somewhere, and they will often do this by selling on your email list and other dodgy practices that could lead to problems for your business.
You can clean some shorter email lists for free by doing it manually, but this can be time-consuming as it involves listing all emails that have bounced to remove them from your list and checking email addresses manually against the one provided by the recipient to ensure that it has been entered correctly.
With a large email list, this would take too long to do for it to be efficient. However, when cleaning an email list to remove any email addresses that are not receiving messages, you can often do this as you go since you will receive a failure to deliver the message when you attempt to send an email, allowing you to remove that email address from the list if the reason given involves the email being no longer valid or not in use.
The good news is that many paid email cleaning services offer free trials that you can take advantage of when verifying and cleaning your email list. Some will also offer free verification checks that you can use to check all or a sample of your list to find out more about whether or not cleaning is required, helping you save money on paying for email cleaning services that you do not need.
How to Clean Up Your Email List?
Cleaning up your email list before you send marketing emails can have many benefits including saving your good reputation and saving you money if your email marketing provider charges you per unit.
You can remove addresses that have recently become inactive along with eliminating email addresses that might have ended up in spam boxes or would have been a hard bounce.
While it’s possible to clean up your email list yourself, this is often a process that can be extremely time consuming and there is often too much room for error. Even if you are a stickler for good spelling and grammar most of the time, chances are that you’re not going to be as good at spotting mistakes as AI, especially when you’re sifting through hundreds of different emails to check.
The best way to clean up your email list is with a reputable email list cleaning software program. This will enable you to identify and clear any issues within minutes, rather than the days that it’d likely take you to do it manually.
Email cleaning software is highly efficient and spotting mistakes and typos and will test email addresses to find out which ones are inactive and can be removed from the list to avoid increasing your bounce rate.
In addition, it can also detect any emails that have blocked you as a sender or ones where your messages are going to spam without reaching the recipient, ultimately saving you a lot of time and money.
How to Pick the Best Email List Cleaning Service?
While there are free email list cleaning services available, as mentioned earlier, these may not be the best ones to pick for your business.
While the cost is usually an important factor to consider, particularly for small businesses on a budget, using a free service might end up costing you more in the long run if they damage your reputation by selling on your data or spamming your subscribers.
When choosing the best email list cleaning service for your business, reputation and trustworthiness are some of the biggest factors to look out for. After all, you are going to be trusting the company with some of the most valuable data in your business, and your own business reputation could be hanging in the balance if you opt for the wrong one.
Checking reviews and opting for a free trial wherever there is one available to get a feel for the software and try it out before deciding whether or not it’s the right option for you is a good idea.
In addition to the above, you will want to choose an email cleaning service that is GDPR compliant and dedicated to keeping your data secure. Never opt for an email cleaning service that might sell your data to anybody else, or even share it without your permission.
Along with irritating your customers, this could lead to serious problems if your business is found to be non-compliant with GDPR legislation as a result.
Who is the Best Email List Cleaner?
The best email list cleaning service for you will depend on a number of factors including the type of business you run, how many emails are on your list, the type of emails you send, how many emails need to be cleaned, and your budget. Keeping all these factors in mind, you can research different email list cleaning software to find one that fits your needs.
Bear in mind that no free email cleaning services are going to be the best – for your business or overall – due to the fact that they will often employ dodgy practices to earn money such as selling your data without your knowledge or permission. In addition, the quality of the email cleaning service may not be very high if you’re not paying for it.
Bouncer is a reputable, GDPR-compliant email cleaning service that is recommended for businesses of all sizes. They offer a free email verification service allowing clients to check their email lists and determine if cleaning is necessary before paying.
For cleaning an email list, they offer very competitively priced credits starting at less than one pence per email address that you can purchase in advance to use at your own convenience as the credits do not expire. You can also buy credits in bulk to save even more money by taking advantage of bulk-buy discounts.
Izabela is a leading contributor to the Bouncer’s blog. She is inspired to help companies all around the world to get emails into their recipients’ inboxes
