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Spring cleaning for your email marketing database and why to do it now!

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Spring is round the corner… And that means it’s the time for some spring cleaning. Besides tackling your home and office, take the opportunity to clean up your email marketing contact lists and databases as well.

 

The quality of a database is a decisive factor in the success of a email marketing campaign. But did you know that, on average, 10% of the information stored in a database becomes out-of-date within a year?

 

As your contact lists collect dust, you’ll start to see the warning signs… The open and click rates of your campaigns will drop, the number of bounces and unsubscribes will rise, and your deliverability will take a hit… It can only mean one thing: It’s time to clean up your database.

 

Before getting started, let’s define what a clean database actually is. To put it simply, a clean database is one that only contains up-to-date, complete, and relevant information, without any duplicates. It’s also important that the structure of the database is based on the use of  complete and standardized fields.

 

You can also have a look at the top email marketing tools that would ease out your task.

Why clean up your email marketing database?

 

The cleanup and maintenance of your databases are essential to ensuring your marketing communications are effective, relevant, and profitable. Here are some good reasons to stay on top of your data.

 

Improve your deliverability

 

Fist of all, if the concept of deliverability is still a little abstract to you, then take a look at our whitepaper on this topic: «Optimize the deliverability of your email campaigns«.

 

Now, let’s look at how a qualified and clean contact list helps your campaign arrive in your recipients’ inbox.

 

Avoid bounces

 

When your contact list isn’t regularly scrubbed and maintained, it may contain invalid or outdated email addresses. Contacts leave companies, change positions, move to a different email address, etc… These cases will trigger bounces (i.e. error messages for each message that is not delivered) that are detected by email providers. As a consequence your campaigns can be blocked temporarily or permanently, if too many bounces occur. By keeping the number of bounces to a minimum, you reduce the risk of being blocked. This optimizes the deliverability of your email marketing campaigns.



Beware of the spamtraps!

 

An out-of-date contact list can also contain so called ‘spamtraps’. These are the real email addresses created by real users before being disabled (often after some time of inactivity). These email addresses are then recycled by ISPs to be used as traps to combat and blacklist spammers. Targeting these addresses when sending campaigns is often a sign for ISPs that your database is of low quality and your reputation as a sender will be negatively impacted as a result.

 

Keep your databases up-to-date and remove non-existent or inaccurate addresses from your mailing lists – your sender reputation and deliverability will thank you!

 

Improve your performance

 

Save your Sales team valuable time

 

In a perfect world, Sales teams would dedicate all their time to exercising their primary objective: sales. In reality, they only spend around one third of their time on selling and prospecting. The rest of the time goes to data entry and researching potential customers online and on social networks.

 

By having an up-to-date database with complete and high-quality, relevant information, you will free-up more time for your Sales team to focus on what they do best and thus generating more revenue.

 

Save money

 

By eliminating the non-existent addresses and correcting the wrong ones, you reduce the number of email or SMS credits used to send your campaigns.

 

Keep your contacts engaged

 

A complete and qualified database means that you can adapt your message for each contact, and personalize it with your contact’s details. Nobody likes to receive a newsletter with an incorrect surname or first name. By regularly updating your contact lists, you improve your brand’s image and increase the engagement rate of your recipients.

 

Mailify’s action plan

 

The are two key fundamentals when it comes to scrubbing your database: identifying incorrect information, and correcting it. This may sound time-consuming, but Mailify offers features to help you.

 

Correct incorrect or incomplete information

 

It can happen that your contacts make a mistake when entering their details. A typo in the email address… or perhaps they forgot to fill in some fields that would be useful for your communications.

That’s why Mailify developed a feature to automatically detect the title of each contact (mr. or mrs.). In addition, the Exclusive offer also includes a smart feature that automatically corrects syntax errors in the domain name of email addresses, efficiently improving the overall quality of your list.

 

In order to avoid errors when entering data, we recommend collecting contact details through a double opt-in process. This method is based on the principle of confirmation of consent on the part of the user. Most often, the user completes a registration form and receives an email containing a link or cta to confirm their registration. This technique ensures that the email address is valid and does not contain any syntax errors, while at the same time providing you with concrete proof of consent.

Identify and delete non-existent or unsubscribed addresses

 

It is important for your sender reputation and the deliverability of your messages to stop sending campaigns to invalid addresses or unsubscribed contacts. With the automatic management of unsubscribes and bounces, Mailify detects email addresses in your blacklists or bounce list and automatically excludes them from your mailings.

 

Delete the duplicates

 

Sometimes a contact subscribes to a newsletter multiple times… Or you might need to merge several contact lists for marketing purposes… This can lead to duplicate contacts in your database.

 

In this case, we recommend that you first identify the duplicates. Then, merge the relevant data fields for your database, and then delete the unnecessary data and duplicate.

Mailify is able to automatically delete duplicate email addresses from your database – saving you significant time!

 

Define standardized processes and share them with your teams

 

Cleaning up a database is hard work. Keeping a database up-to-date is a never-ending job. It’s a daily mission that involves raising awareness among all your employees. It is important for everyone to know why the database was created, what fields to fill in, and to define a  standardized way of working.

 

Finally, for the arrival of spring, make your opening rates bloom with Predictive Sending – a new feature available in the Exclusive offer!

Let the behavioral statistics decide for you. Based on the collected data and an advanced AI-driven algorithm, Mailify calculates the best time to send your campaign for each contact. Learn more about Predictive Sending

 

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