List Hygiene

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What is List Hygiene?

List hygiene entails removing inactive (cold) contacts from your email displays and keeping your remaining list engaged (warm) with healthy email sending habits. This practice improves your inbox placement rates and saves you money as you’ll only be paying for and engaging with your active contacts.

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Why is it important?

Email service providers (ESPs) have become smarter and more aware of what recipients want to receive in their inbox. They are continually reviewing the emails you’re sending, and the engagement recipients are having with those messages. Your opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and spam complaints are all factored into the algorithms that determine inbox placement. A poorly maintained list resulting in low engagement is a recipe for your messages getting flagged as spam.

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Cold vs. Warm Contacts

A cold email recipient is one who hasn’t been contacted or engaged with your emails for four to six months. Meanwhile, a warm email recipient has opted into your messaging, been contacted in the last four to six months, and regularly engages with your emails.

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Cleaning your list

Safely cleaning an existing list requires a couple of steps but is well worth the effort.

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Scrub the list for issues

The first thing you should do is locate and address apparent issues. You should:

• Remove duplicate entries

• Delete obviously fake email addresses or bots

• Delete email addresses that frequently bounced or have marked your emails as spam

• Remove any email addresses with obvious typos or errors as soon as possible

• Remove role-based addresses (e.g., admin@, support@, sales@, office@, marketing@). These addresses are typically forwarded to groups of individuals, which invalidates the unsubscribe function and is a direct violation of the CAN-SPAM legislation.

Ultimately, it’s much easier to drive conversions and engagement if your contacts are real and high quality.

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Confirm cold contacts’ interest

Next, ensure that you’re working with a list of subscribers that still want to hear from you. To confirm a contact’s interest, send a re-engagement email to your Unengaged Contacts Smart Segment that asks contacts to engage with the email to confirm their interest or unsubscribe. A confirmation at least once every two years is recommended.

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Remove uninterested contacts

Wait at least 24-48 hours after sending your re-engagement email to see if any contacts express interest. Once you’re ready to remove any uninterested contacts, head to Campaigns and click into your re-engagement email. Scroll down to your Activity table and click Export and select Download CSV from the dropdown menu.

When the export is ready, an email containing a download link will be sent to the email address associated with the Privy account which you are currently logged in. To review which email address you are logged in with, click on your Business Name in the upper right corner of your dashboard and select My Information from the dropdown menu.

Once you download the CSV, filter out any ‘email-opened’ or ‘email-clicked’ activity (to exclude contacts that engaged with your email). Import the remaining contacts into Privy as unsubscribed.

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Maintain list health

A clean list doesn’t stay that way forever! In addition to periodically performing the “scrubbing” steps outlined above, you should also ask for feedback from your contacts to make sure you’re sending valuable content at a consistent, yet not overwhelming cadence.

Monitoring your performance is also crucial to ensuring you have a healthy, engaged list. Here are some signs that you may need to clean your list again:

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Monitor your spam rate

A spam complaint rate of 0.1-0.2% on an email is a red flag that will increase your chances of bouncing or landing in the spam folder for all emails moving forward.

Privy provides clear insight into your current Spam rate via the Spam Card on the Privy Dashboard

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Monitor your bounce rate

An ideal bounce rate will be 2% or lower. Anything between 2% and 5% is worth investigating, and anything over 5% is considered critical and requires immediate action for improvement.

Privy provides clear insight into your current Bounce rate via the Bounces Card on the Privy Dashboard

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Routinely import unsubscribes

If you are using an external Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Email Service Provider (ESP) that also collects and stores the subscription status of your contacts, please make sure that this information is available in Privy. A routine (e.g., Biweekly or Monthly) import of unsubscribes generated from these services is an easy way to ensure that you respect your contact’s communication preferences and do not unintentionally contact them via Privy when they’ve already expressed they want no further contact.