How to manually clean your email list
This guide will walk you through the process of cleaning your contact list by removing inactive, unsubscribed, and bounced email addresses (addresses that are no longer valid and result in error messages).
To get started, you will need the following:
- a systeme.io account
- a list of contacts
The deliverability of your emails is considered good when they are correctly received by your contacts. This means that your emails reach their destination without landing in the spam folder of your recipients.
Sending emails to non-existent recipients will lower your deliverability rate and can also harm the reputation of your domain name regarding email transfer.
It is therefore important to have high open rates to improve the deliverability of your emails; we recommend aiming for a minimum open rate of 20% to be among the top users of our email sending system (Read this article to learn more about this).
1. Clean your email list by deleting inactive contacts
Head to the "CRM" tab in your account, then click on "Contacts". (number 1 in the image)
Then, activate the filter "Email activity" (number 2 in the image), and then choose the date from 1 month ago in the field "No email opened or clicked since". (number 3 in the image)
Example: we selected the date 05/05/2022, knowing that today's date is 04/06/2022.
Note: The choice of date (from X time ago) depends on how often you send emails.
IMPORTANT : We recommend that you keep your customers' data for accounting purposes, for example.
For this, we suggest using another criterion to keep only the contacts who have never purchased anything : "Contact state" (number 4 in the image) ⇒ "Has not made any payment yet". (number 5 in the image)
You will get the list of all contacts who have not opened or clicked on a link in your emails in the last month, and who have never purchased anything from you.
All you will have to do at that point is select the entire list that will appear (number 6 in the image), then click on "Delete" to obtain a healthy database. (number 7 in the image)
2. No longer send emails to your inactive contacts
Don't forget that you should always keep your customers' data (that is, the contacts who have already purchased from you), to avoid losing their purchase history.
Moreover, it's good business practice to retain your customers' data, as it is far more valuable than that of your contacts who have never purchased.
Therefore, you should choose to unsubscribe inactive customers from your emails rather than delete them from your contact list. Unsubscribing inactive customers from your emails will improve your email open rates and thus your deliverability.
To find out how to stop sending emails to your inactive contacts, you need to follow the procedure below :
1. Go to the "CRM" tab, click on it, and then click on "Contacts". (number 8 in the image)
2. Then, activate the filter "Email activity" (number 9 in the image), and then choose the date from 1 month ago in the field "No email opened or clicked since" (number 10 in the image). Example: we selected the date 05/05/2022, knowing that today's date is 04/06/2022.
3. Finally, select the list (number 11 in the image), click on "More actions" (number 12 in the image), and click on "Unsubscribe from marketing emails". (number 13 in the image)
This will ensure that these contacts no longer receive any of your emails.
NOTE : You can also assign a TAG to your list of inactive contacts and try to re-engage them with an email campaign; this will allow you to recover some of them.
However, be careful with re-engagement campaigns; we advise against trying to re-engage old contacts.
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