Why clean your email list?

Vanity metrics like ‘how big is your list', ‘what is your list size'? etc. mean nothing. What matters should be ‘what is your open rate'? ‘How many clicks do you get per mailing?' and ‘what are your conversion rates?' So here is the oxymoron – having a bigger list, can sometimes mean less total (not just %) opens and clicks. Yes, having a bigger list can actually create less income…

It is all about activity. If you're mailing to an old, no longer warm list, your results will suffer. For example, did you know you get traps set by email service providers where they monitor ‘dead' accounts and use that as a strike against you for ‘bad email practices'? It's true, they purposely try to trip you up and monitor that you are mailing to people that want your email.

The trick to increasing your email performance? List scrubbing! Getting all those people off your mailing list who would never open your email anyway, abandoned email accounts, etc. By not emailing these people, your open and click rates will in fact, go up!

How to clean your email list:

Here is how you can do it with Platform.ly in combination with EmailListVerify:

1) Go to the ‘Integrations' tab and click on EmailListVerify. Add your API Key from your account with them, if you haven't already. Note that only needs to be done on the first time.

2) Select and filter the contacts you want to send for checking. Using our ‘Projects' ‘Segments' & ‘Tags' options, the sky is the limit here with filtering. (only want to send .fr emails? Only want to send emails from a certain country or emails that opted in more than a certain timeframe ago? All super easy using tags.)

3) Hit ‘Save & Send' and you're done. Our system will send the list to ELV, they will take anywhere from 15mins to a few hours to process it all depending on the size of the list.

Check out this quick animated .gif to show you this:

As time goes you can refresh the ‘History' page and view in real time the results as they are returned to us. Once the process finishes, the status will change from ‘pending' to ‘finished' and you will be able to see the results that are returned from EmailListVerify.

Check your results:

In this example, it took around 45 minutes to, process and return my list of just over 3,800 emails. It returned 3,415 valid emails and that means over 400 didn't pass EmailListVerify tests, but… Accept All will still get the emails, so Platformly does not unsubscribe those users.

As you can see from the below-animated .gif cleaning my list before mailing today saved me from emailing 231 emails that would only hurt my sending reputation, reduce my open rates and affect my future emails.

Now it's your turn:

You will need to excuse me now, I am off to mail the 3,605 clean emails in this segment. 🙂 If you're already a member of Platform.ly then login now and give it a try. If you are not, give us a try here.