What is Email List Hygiene?

Email list hygiene is a act of removing contacts from your email list to improve your email deliverability

Why would I want to remove contacts from my email list to improve email deliverability?

The reason you want to remove contacts from your email list is because they are no longer engaging with your emails. Now that internet service providers are tracking engagement, If you continue to mail email addresses that do not engage with your emails it will decrease your sender score.

When you score decreases, this decreases the number of emails delivered to the contacts that would normally have opened or clicked your email.

With sender score having an increased role of getting your email delivered to the inbox, leaving these un-engaged contacts on your email list becomes more of a liability than an asset.

Removing these liability contacts will increase your sender score with each email service provider your send to giving your quality contacts the best possible chance to receive your emails.

What is Automatic Email List Hygiene?

Automatic email list hygiene in responsemagic.com email marketing system will automatically track the engagement with each individual contact on your email list.

If they have received 7 email messages and have not engaged in any way with your emails resonsemagic.com will set this contact to pending status on your email list.

Which means you will no longer send emails to this contact via your auto-response email campaign or your broadcast emails.

This ensures that you always have a clean engaged senders score.

responsemagic.com does not require that you turn automatic email list hygiene on however the reward for doing so is that your emails will be sent from a set of servers dedicated to servicing customers with hygienic email lists.

This means the cleanest most reputable servers will send your email when you turn this feature on.

A no brainer that I will be doing with my own email list.

How to Use Automatic Email List Hygiene

Automatic list hygiene is simple, just register or login at responsemagic.com.

1. Go to Account ->click Settings

2. Click “enable list cleaning”

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Joan writes,

This is a great question Joan,

You are correct in thinking that phone number might decrease your opt-in rates.

I’ve had phone number decrease opt-in rates by up to 50% in some offers.

Here is the deal

You need to measure the metric that makes the most sense to your business goals.

If your goal is to build a large audience that knows likes and trusts you by providing exceptional content, you might want to go with email only.

But if you want to convert as many possible leads into sales as quickly as possible, and you are going to be calling every lead, I think getting phone number is important.

The other option is to do a hybrid where you make phone number (optional).

This allows you to call all of the people who want to receive a call without losing anyone who just wants to join your email list.

At the end of the day each business is different so you just need to try all three to see which one delivers the best result for your business goals.

I suggest that you create 3 capture pages that have that same offer to try each of these methods for your business to see what works best

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1. Choose the right email sending program to handle your message sending. If you are sending an email to more than ten recipients at a time, you should be using an email sending program, such as an Autoresponder. Never send bulk email (sending to more than ten people at a time, either through CC or BCC) using your personal email client like Gmail or Yahoo. Doing so can get your account locked and deleted. Autoresponder systems, like Response Magic, are designed for sending bulk emails and have partnerships with email providers to allow for larger sends. They carry the weight of the sending so you can focus on the effectiveness of your message without worrying if you are breaking any sending rules of your email service provider.
2. Make sure your list is confirmed. Always send emails ONLY to people who have requested it. Make sure your list is clean and that each person has actually opted in to get your emails. For more tips on building an email list, click here.
3. Make your message’s purpose clear and avoid the hype. Use a strong, clear subject line that avoids spammy keywords that will effect your message’s email deliverability, such as ‘congratulations’, ‘earn money’ and ‘get cash’. The subject line is one of the first things an ISP will look at when they are determining where to put your email – the inbox, the junkmail or the dreaded black-hole of auto-delete. The ISP uses computers that search for keywords and phrases in the subject line, so you want to clearly identify your email’s purpose and make it sound like you really know the person you are sending to. Often times, a simple subject line is best, such as ‘Hey, NAME, just touching base…”
4. Protect yourself from abuse backlash. No matter how clean your list is, there will always be someone who forgets that they signed up to receive your emails and will submit a spam complaint to their ISP against you. This is where having an email sending provider, like Response Magic, can come in handy. They deal with all the abuse complaints for you and work with the ISPs to clear up any misunderstandings.
5. Segment your sending list. When sending your email, it’s best to narrow down who exactly you are sending to, through list segmentation, even when using a bulk send provider. Sending in narrowed chunks allows your message to be specifically tailored to smaller demographics, making it more effective. It also allows the sending program to further divide your email across more sending email servers, which greatly enhances email deliverability.
6. Always be consistent with your sending practices. This means using the same email address and sending program to send the emails, and sending the same types of messages to your audience. When you set up your autoresponder, choose the email address for your account that you would like to send from and stick with it. People will begin adding that address to their safe list, and the more times your email is opened when being sent from that address, the more the ISPs will identify your email address as being a safe sender.
7. Ask recipients to add you to their contact list. This helps identify you as a safe sender and insures your email gets into their inbox. It’s best to add this request to the top of the very first email you send and then to the bottom of every email you send there after as a small reminder.
8. Test before you send. Most don’t think about this – but it’s an important step for email deliverability. Sending just one broken email or an email with critical error in it can cause your future emails to be blocked or discarded by ISPs. Write your message and then send it to yourself. Test it to make sure all the images, links and personalization insert variables work properly. Also, make sure you track and understand the statistics of your previous email sends, as this will help you send effectively.
9. Format your email. Avoid overly long emails and avoid very short emails with more images and hyperlinks than text. These types of emails tend to trigger spam filters. You want to write a concise, balanced email, remembering that you have roughly five seconds to catch your reader’s eyes and get them to make a click-through decision. Typically, one graphic or no graphic is best, as most ISPs these days turn images in emails off by default. Put your key link near the top of your email and not hidden in the middle of text or at the bottom. The key is to get in, say what you need to get them to click, and get out.
10. Give readers a clear way to unsubscribe. I know what you’re thinking – ‘why would I want people to unsubscribe?’. Simple – if someone truly wants to unsubscribe from your list, they are going to find a way to do it. It’s best to make it easy for them than risk having them submit a spam complaint against you to your ISPs which will hurt the email deliverability to all those on your mailing list who still want to receive your emails. All email send programs, like Response Magic, are required to have a clear and easy way for the reader to opt out, and Response Magic handles all the opt-outs for you.

Just following these ten simple rules could greatly increase your email deliverability and getting your message to your intended audience.

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1. Use a headline. You need to add a word that will engage their interest and trigger them to click it. Trigger words are primarily words that encourage or represent an action like ‘watch’, ‘save’, ‘listen’, ‘get’ and ‘give’ . They can also be words that trigger an emotional response, such as ‘love’, ‘discover’, ‘happy’ and ‘need’. Take Note: Avoid using spam trigger words, such as ‘cash’, ‘money’, ‘prize’, ‘win’ and ‘contest’ – unless you like spending time in the junk mail folder. Bonus: Watch this video on how to double your sales the way nobody talks about to get more great tips on how to write killer headlines and grab your prospect’s attention.
2. Personalize the subject. Whether it’s through the use of a replacement variable such as ~~firstname~~ or {{firstname}} on an autoresponder, or by manually typing the person’s name in an individual email, starting your subject line with the person’s name increases the chance that the person will both notice the email and open the email. Take note: If your autoresponder program doesn’t support auto-personalization or replacement variables, it’s time to get a new autoresponder.
3. Be personable. You are sending to a real person, using their real name in the subject, right? Well, that real person expects they are getting an email from a real person, too. Do your best to add a personal touch to the email, including your picture, contact information, social media connection links, and a personal signature. Keep your language casual and friendly. Avoid hype and gimmick. Be yourself and be approachable. Bonus: Use a personal looking email address, like yourname@gmail.com  instead of info@hypybizdomainname.com
4. Be Mobile Aware. More and more people are using smart phones to check their email. A smart phone will limit the space you have to get your message across because they only show part of longer subject lines. However, they do also show snippets of the email content. So, in order to improve your email open rates for mobile, keep your subject line short and make the first two sentences of your email your power-statement.
5. Test. And then test some more. Testing isn’t the most fun thing to do, we understand, but when you are representing yourself electronically it can make the difference between your message being successful or your message falling flat. You should test sending your email to yourself on several different browsers, including mobile devices so you can check out #4 above. Also, sign up for a Gmail, a Yahoo, and an MSN email address and send to them. They are free and will give you a good sampling of how your message will look on arrival and clue you in to any spam-filter trigger words you may need to remove. Bonus: Some autoresponders, including Response Magic, come with spam-detection software that will rate your email for you before you send it.
6. Timing is everything. Knowing when to send is just as important as knowing what to send in order to improve your email open rates. You, the email sender, are just one of many who is vying for that golden position in John G. Smith’s inbox. John has emails coming from his job, his wife, his mom, other opportunities and that Hickory Farms website he used to buy his boss’s Christmas present last year. What’s the trick? Understanding when everyone else sends their emails. The majority of work-related emails happen in the morning, between 7am and noon EST. The majority of personal emails happen after lunch when John is trying to avoid the report on his desk by trying to talk his wife into the family dinner his mom just emailed him about. Personal emails tend to stop at around 6pm EST when John goes home and can continue the dinner argument in person. So, to beat the bulk, your best bet is to send your email after 7pm EST and before 6 am EST to have the best chance at being seen separately from all the other email clutter.
7. Remind them of who you are and why you are emailing them. Did you get their contact information from a contact form on your website? Pick them up from a Facebook conversation or a Google Hangout? Were they passed on to you by a friend? Tell them. Remind them how they know you or how you got their information so they don’t automatically assume you are a crazy stalker or spammer and demote you to the “ban sender” list. Be honest: Even if you purchased the lead, chances are high they filled out a targeting survey. Let them know that is how you got their contact info – that it was because they expressed interest in something.
8. Start with a good list. Keeping #7 in mind, it is important that you are emailing people who actually want you to email them in the first place. Don’t just start grabbing people’s info from off the internet and emailing them randomly. That will quickly put you into the spammer category and is counter-productive to improving email open rates. Also, tread carefully with purchasing lead lists. Avoid ‘bulk’ and cheap leads. Go for live ‘survey’ leads and a company that can give you details about how they capture lead information. Bonus: The best lead is the lead you capture yourself. Response Magic makes it easy to do this by helping you to generate awesome capture forms, including YouTube videos, that you can place on your website, in your email, on your blog – or just use one of the pages we give you.
9. Divide your list. Once you have a good list, divide it. Then divide it again. You want to be as specific as possible with your message targeting. You can divide your list by gender, age, education, location and more when the information is available to you. The way you approach a university educated business woman will be different from how you would approach a retired salesman. If it isn’t, it should be and you should stop what you are doing and go get dividing!
10. Pay Attention to the feedback. Once you have your list segregated, you have written a short, killer, personalized subject line and you have your message composed, test it again. Then, once you begin receiving feedback from your autoresponder or email sending software, go over the feedback and statistics. Try different subject lines to different targeted lists and see if that helps to improve email open rates. If your email program doesn’t provide you with email statistics, you’re doing it wrong and you are sending email in the dark. Sending email without feedback statistics is like sending those junk-mail flyers we all still get in the snail-mail, a whopping 95% of which gets tossed before ever being brought into the house. Without feedback, how can you possibly know if your message is reaching its audience effectively? You can’t. So, if your method of sending email doesn’t provide you with sending and receipt statistics, find one that does. Bonus: Watch this video on how to double your sales the way nobody talks about to get more great tips on how to track your statistics.

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Video Transcription:

Hey Everyone! Ryan Hache here and I want to do a quick video to talk a little bit about Confirm Opt-in and sending a confirmation email. Now, with Response Magic, confirm opt-in is a little bit different because we have the hybrid confirm opt-in system.

Now what that means is we run parallel networks for both confirm opt-in and non-confirm opt-in. So what this means is when somebody opts-in directly off your website, and we can verify that that’s a living breathing human being opting off that website; we deem it So that you can email them.

So there are two levels. Someone you can email and someone who’s confirm opt-in and you can email those people from entirely different cluster of servers.

What does that mean for you?

Well when you go for the confirm opt-in, it’s a lot more legit. You’re going to have a lot more engagement with those people because they’ve said, “Yes I confirm I definitely want to be on the subscription” Whereas, on the other hand, you’re not going to have quite as many engaging-users with that list. Which means that, your engagement score is going to drop and you’re going to have a little less Email deliver-ability with the people you don’t confirm.

With Response Magic you get the best of both worlds.

So you can go for the confirm opt-in and if they don’t click the link, which, a good majority of them don’t. I shouldn’t say majority. It’s more like twenty percent of people don’t click your confirm opt-in links even if they want to be on your list. So that’s just a loss. That twenty percent is just a loss right off the top.

With response magic, you’re able to recoup that loss and engage with that other twenty percent that you normally wouldn’t be able to.

With using an entirely different network so it doesn’t compromise your Email Deliver-ability on all your opt-ins. So you get the best of both worlds.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you how I’ve set up my auto responder system so that you can use it as a framework if you’d like to go completely confirm opt-in, like I choose to So, I’m going to go into my list that’s right on my blog here. And I’m going to pull up my blog just to let you know. Okay?

So, this is the list, were talking about people who opt into my updates on my blog. And I’m just going to go ahead and put-in a test email address and hit update.

Okay, so now what happens is I bring them to a page here that says “Thank you for Subscribing” you should receive a confirmation email. Now, what I’ve set up over here. So if I click on my Email sequence, in my automated response, I want to put a confirmation link so if I click on the edit button and I scrolled-down here.

Ok I just got the email. So I’m going to show you how that came in. So here’s my first email. So I say:

“Hey how’s it going in the next few days I’m going to give you this…”

And

“Click below to confirm your subscription and get access to the first three videos”

So it’s kind of a two in one. If you click the subscription you get access. Okay?

Now if I clicked that it’s going to “Confirm Opt-in” that user. So they go on to a different set of servers and get extremely high levels of engagement and deliver ability.

Now, here’s how I set that up. So once I get my link that I want to use I just go to the hyperlink click on hyperlink I go to the protocol “Other”, so I select “Other”, so doesn’t have the HTTP and then I put-in tilde tilde Opt-in Link tilde tilde.

And click OK

And now you’re OPT-in link is done. Okay?

So it’s that easy to put the Opt-in link in the Email.

Now, what I want to do is I want to go to manage lists.

And I want to go to that list and right down here where it says:

Confirmation Email

All I have to do it is put in the link that I want them to go. So there is the link that I want them to go. I click update, and I’m done.

So now, every time someone clicks on that automated response they’re going to click on my confirmation link and be brought to the page that I want to deliver them to.

And now they’re “Confirmed Opt-in” on my list, and I have a much higher deliver ability rate with those contacts, than I have with the ones that don’t.

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But how do you easily weed out the great engaged prospects from the ones who are just ignoring your emails, or worse marking them as spam?

Response Magic’s new List Segmentation Tool allows you to quickly create lists of contacts based on their engagement level.   Response Magic tracks the contacts who open your emails and contacts who click on links inside of those emails – both of which are factors in the engagement algorithm.  You can then tell Response Magic to segment out those contacts from your general pool list into a new separate list.  Then, by focusing your marketing efforts on the contacts who show strong interest in your emails, you can build a stronger engagement reputation.

More and more ISPs and email service providers are starting to take a look at engagement and how to add it to their current filtering techniques.  Be ahead of the curve by starting to build your engagement lists now!

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All is revealed in this video:

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1. Contact Stats will show you how each of your campaigns are doing at a glance by showing you vital statistical data for each. This data includes Open Rates and Opt Out percentages – two key factors to compare when determining the health and effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.
2. Email Stats gives you three levels of data that lets you dig down deep to find out exactly which list and which emails are successfully delivering your message to your prospects:
• First you can see your open rates and other data for your Broadcasts over all, your Campaign Lists overall and then those stats broken down by list.
• Next, you can click the Magnify Glass icon next to each list to view the individual statistics for each email in that list
• Finally, you can click the Magnify Glass icon next to each email to see a 7-day history of statistics for that particular email, allowing you to see its performance over time.

With this statistical information, you can fine-tune your campaigns by removing emails with low open rates or high opt-out rates and by building on the emails that perform well for your targeted marketing.

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