What is email hygiene?
Email hygiene refers to the practice of maintaining an accurate and up-to-date list of recipients.
Your email list management efforts will be ineffective unless you have a clean list to work with. More than 20% of email sign-ups contain typos, syntax mistakes, domain issues, and other errors of various kinds (source).
This is an essential component of customized email marketing, yet it is the most difficult to master. A clean list is a foundation for a segmented list, excellent open and click-through rates, and remarkable email income. Email hygiene is described as the practice of regularly checking and deleting incorrect email addresses from your mailing list on a regular basis. However, there is more to it than that.
It is not enough to just have valid email addresses. It is also necessary to have data that is in the correct field, not have duplicate contacts, and to have integration throughout your lists.
What is data cleansing, and why is it important?
Data is similar to oil.
For starters, it is the most important resource available to organizations today. You’d take crude oil and clean it and process it to make it into petroleum, paraffin, diesel fuel, or another end product back in the day when oil was at its peak. You wouldn’t just keep the crude oil and cash checks in your possession, would you? Data is comparable, only that it is considerably more valuable. You can sell crude oil, but you can’t do anything else if the information is incorrect.
Data cleaning, also known as data cleansing, is the process of eliminating or correcting information that is inaccurate, incomplete, irrelevant, duplicated, or poorly structured in any way. It is correcting all of the data that has no relevance to your company.
How to maintain proper email hygiene: how to standardize data
Consider the following scenario: you have all of your data in an Excel file.
The categories are represented by the columns, while the information about a single person is represented by the rows. There are two ways to look at it, and it should be treated the same way in both cases:
- Consistency on the horizontal axis
- Vertical uniformity is important.
How often should I clean my email list?
In an ideal world, your list would always be free of errors. That’s difficult to maintain, especially when you consider that B2B email data decays at a rate of 2.1 percent every month (22.5 percent per year).
Consider your email list to be a residence. A large corporation would be a family with a large number of children. Things become cluttered rapidly, and you must clean more frequently in order to maintain some sort of a habitable environment.
A tiny business or a solopreneur is analogous to a single individual who lives alone and spends most of his or her time at work. You will need to clean your house far less regularly if you want to maintain it looking nice.
You should clean up your list in accordance with the size of your firm and the indications listed above. To keep your list clean, we recommend that you clean it once a month or more, and we recommend that you use an automated program or partner to do it for you.
