Email list hygiene is essential and the better you are at it, the better reputation and delivery you are likely to enjoy.

There are many complicated strategies, but they are error-prone and unnecessary. My favorite strategy for list hygiene is a simple additive system only. Meaning we call out which subscribers we want to include in our mailings and leave the rest alone.

Here’s how we do it:

Providing you have an enterprise class email platform, with real segmenting ability (no, Aweber can’t do any of this), then hygiene is a breeze.

We select only:

Subscribers who have clicked in the last 60-days
Subscribers who have opened in the last 30-days
Subscribers who have been inactive fewer than 10-days

We call this our 60/30/10 segment. If this is how you generally mail daily, your list will generally be quite healthy as far as hygiene goes.

We will sometimes do a reactivation campaign or just a once-per-month wider segment that reaches 180-day-clickers and sometimes older openers, we would only do this when we think we have a stellar subject line and corresponding content that we think has a chance of creating re-engagement. Rarely do we ever email inactives older than 30 days. We are not very fond of openers who never click either.

If you are ready to upgrade to enterprise-class email, let’s chat.

I hope you found this post useful.

As always, if you’d like to discuss this topic further, feel free to connect.

Thanks for reading…

John Valenty

CEO
Skype: john.valenty
john(at)earnware.com