Email Marketing Best Practices: Email Segmentation & List Cleansing

Launching an email marketing campaign is more complicated than a simple click.

Each internet service provider (ISP), email address, and business email exchange have varying rules, so businesses turn to specialists like marketing automation solution providers for help.

Deliverability (how many emails actually reach the inbox) is affected by a number of factors, but the most important depends on you — the sender.

To improve deliverability, marketers follow email marketing best practices by removing inactive subscribers from their lists. The main objective is to get rid of “dead” addresses, boost the inbox placement rate, and improve engagement.

Email Segmentation

An inactive subscriber is someone who doesn’t read your emails. Frustratingly, these inactive subscribers are not taking any action to stop receiving your emails which skews your metrics.

Email segmentation allows you to divide your bulk list of emails into unique and insightful segments. This way you can work effectively with your two segments – active users and inactive users.

You may be wondering why you should not remove the inactive subscribers and focus on those who actively engage with you. That’s because some of these inactive subscribers could engage again if you send them the right emails.

Segmentation enables you to deal with different groups according to their preferences, which can boost your conversions.

Intention, anxiety, and motivation are based on age, gender, interests, time – the conversion funnel list is limitless. Segmentation helps you to stay relevant with your ever-changing email list and adapt to their needs.

Email List-Cleaning

List cleansing isn’t easy – who wants to say bye to a potential customer? Ultimately, your online reputation depends on maintaining a healthy email list. How you implement list-cleaning is just as essential as deciding who to remove. The two best options:

1. Removing any addresses that meet the list-cleaning threshold (usually inactivity) from all future email blasts

2. Sending a re-engagement email requesting users take action to stay on the list

Removing any address inactive for six to 12 months is a good start. Some organizations think cleansing their lists is not important – until they encounter serious email delivery problems. If you wait until your email is delivered to the junk folder or, even worse, blacklisted, you risk being forced into more aggressive cleansing decisions than marketers who actively manage their data.