How To Do Email Hygiene Like a Growth Hacker

How To Do Email Hygiene Like a Growth Hacker

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
February 19th, 2021
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Email hygiene is critical.

If you’re running multichannel campaigns on both LinkedIn and email, the last thing you want is for you to have a lot of your emails to bounce.

Not only does it hurt your email reputation, but it also wastes valuable resources.

Here’s the funny thing.

Quite a few growth hackers often forget to conduct regular email hygiene and sometimes find themselves in a pickle.

In today’s guide, I want to show you how growth hackers should

Why Email Hygiene is Important

Back in the day, nobody really cared for personalization or email hygiene.

But, with improved algorithms and heightened competition, having good email hygiene is a must for any growth hacker that wants to improve their success rates.

ISPs judge you by how often your emails get sent to your spam folders, how many emails you send that “bounce”, and other factors.

This is why preventing instances of “bad” emails is extremely critical to the success of your email.

You see maintain a reputation with the email address that you have.

If your reputation gets tarnished, you’ll find it harder to get emails sent out – ISPs will just straight up reject some of your emails – and this will it make it hard to do email campaigns.

However, it’s not just how many bounces you get that affect your email deliverability and email hygiene. One of the most significant factors that can affect you is the engagement rate.

Engagement is email opens, replies, and the email content – which can trigger spam traps that lookout for specific phrases that amount to spam.

Understanding email deliverability is key to understanding email hygiene.

Use an Email Verification Service

Please do not send out emails right away.

Just don’t.

You should always use an email verification service before sending out emails.

email hygiene, How To Do Email Hygiene Like a Growth Hacker

Check out my guide to the top email verification tools!

This holds especially true for new campaigns that you want to try out.

It takes less than 10 minutes to run an email verification service so there is no excuse for you not to do so.

However, here’s an important note.

You don’t have to use all the reports provided by the email verification tool. There are times where a basic report is all you need and all the other details aren’t even required. You don’t want to fall into analysis paralysis, a simple verification is all that you need.

Don’t Delete Inactive Subscribers

A common misconception that a lot of marketers have with email hygiene is that they need to delete inactive subscribers.

Don’t.

Not only is it a waste of good email prospects – provided that the emails are still verified – but inactivity doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t want to use your services.

You need to treat inactive subscribers differently.

First off, move inactive subscribers from your current lists and check their details out.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Why are they inactive?
  • Do they belong to another market?
  • Would another product or campaign apply to them?

Once you determine the answers to these questions, you can now start to re-segment and create different campaigns that are suited to their specific characteristics.

Alternatively, you can always choose to tone down the emails that you send out to these particular groups of email subscribers.

Personalize Your Emails!

I shouldn’t have to mention this, but one of the best ways to get your emails sent to be marked as spam is the lack of personalization.

At BAMF, we’ve always stressed the value of personal, organic-sounding emails because they appeal to the receiver.

When a prospect receives a generic email that you’ve sent to two thousand other people, they’ll know that there’s no real value there.

Your organization appears lazy, and there was no effort whatsoever to conduct research about the person.

Now you run the risk of getting sent to the spam folder.

The more emails that are sent to the spam folder, the more your email reputation gets hurt, and other mail service providers do keep track.

The result?

Other email service providers will automatically flag an incoming message from your end as spam before they even get into the prospect’s inbox.

Yikes.

Be Careful of Your Subject Lines

Subject lines are the main reason your emails can get sent to spam.

This is why we spend so much time crafting subject lines that resonate with our prospects.

Think about it.

When you look through your inbox, don’t you just ignore emails that have subject lines that you don’t like?

You improve email deliverability rates with better subject lines and you lessen your risk of getting sent to the spam folder.

Segment

Segmentation works well for email hygiene because it forces you to split your email lists. Not only is it easier for you to maintain and clean up these lists, but it also allows you to personalize your messaging even further.

As we’ve talked about earlier, personalization is key in getting better engagement with your prospects and maintaining a better reputation with ISPs.

Double Opt-In

If you want to make sure that your clients are receptive to your emails, get them to double opt-in to the mailing list.

Now a lot of people will say that a single opt-in is alright, but if you really want to maintain a “warm list” of subscribers, this is the best way.

You can treat those who double opt-in as a different group and send messages to them more frequently.

Data Cleansing

Data cleansing is basically checking and verifying the data that you have about a prospect. It’s usually a long process, but it’s essential because it helps with general email hygiene.

Here’s what.

Not everyone is going to stay in the same job forever, some people are going to switch their email addresses, and some might even change their last names.

If your information is up-to-date, you can create even better personalization and avoid sending emails to the wrong people.

Here are three things to note:

Duplicates

There are instances where you could have duplicate data, but we’re not just talking about an entry in your database that’s repeated twice.

At times a contact could be registered twice with different job titles and emails, or have two email addresses under the same name.

Figuring out how to minimize duplicates is key in maintaining hygiene.

Horizontal Consistencies

If their email address looks off or if the prospect’s email doesn’t seem to relate to their position you might have an issue with horizontal consistency.

Say, Adam Smith who works at Growth Inc. has an email that’s [email protected] in your records.

You’ll know straight off the bat that there’s something wrong with his email because it doesn’t use his first name.

Finding little pieces of information like this are great to make sure you have consistent email lists that allow you to convert.

Missing Data

Make sure that you fill up all information about a prospect in your database.

Missing data could lead to poor conversions when you try to do personalized outreach.

Make It a Habit

Cleaning up your lists shouldn’t only be done before using them.

Here’s what.

Make it a habit to conduct proper email hygiene every 30-day interval.

This way, your records are always updated and you can use it as an opportunity to check if the contacts are still in the same company, or have the same positions, etc.

Like all great growth hacking practices, they only become effective if they become a habit.

Takeaways

As you can see, personalization is key in email hygiene.

If your aim is to resonate with your prospects, then personalization must already be a priority for you.

And, email hygiene just comes to you naturally.

Email hygiene is highly important to your growth strategy because it protects one of your most important email marketing assets: your email itself.

By spending an hour or two every month, you can ensure that your email reputation is at its prime and that you are in a position to grow.

So, is your email clean enough?

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
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