Email marketing: how to clean your database to improve ROI

 Email marketing: How to clean your database to improve ROI-Overview

The  databases  are the foundation on which rests all your  email marketing . No matter how good the content of your emails is, if your database is not well organized you will not get good results, and you may even end up classified as spam.

How to avoid this problem? 

Let's see the reasons why databases get "dirty" and how to leave yours like the jets of gold to improve your ROI.

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Email marketing how to clean your database to improve ROI

Why clean up your database?

If you have been doing email marketing for years  , it is common for you to have  outdated contacts. Email addresses that no longer even exist.Invalid data or even people who never wanted to receive your emails. And this can bring you several  negative consequences :

Email providers have a number of filters and criteria to prevent users from receiving spam . If your emails are marked as  spam  by more than 0.1% of the recipients.Or if they have an open rate lower than 15%, the email provider will identify them as  spam .

And they will never reach the inbox of the recipients. As you can imagine, this can wreck your entire email marketing strategy.

As you probably already know,  data protection laws at the European level have become stricter in recent years (the famous RGPD) .

If your database contains contacts who have not explicitly consented to receive your messages, you could be violating these regulations. And that can lead to serious penalties.

Being marked as spam can seriously affect your brand's reputation . 

If users perceive that you send spam, you will have lost their trust, and with it the opportunity to convert them into customers.

And lastly,  dirty databases mess up your metrics too . If your emails do not reach the recipients' inbox or you have a high bounce rate.

It is more difficult to calculate the real effectiveness of your email marketing and implement strategies to improve your ROI.

Another frequent problem in databases is  poor segmentation  and  disorganization .

For example, there are often problems with data formatting. 

If you ask users about their job title, they will most likely introduce several different options for the same position: "marketing director", "CMO", "chief marketing officer" .... 

If you don't have this type of control well controlled Of factors, these users could end up on different mailing lists, when in fact they should be the same. 

In the long run, this creates a lot of complications in managing your email strategy. So let's see how to begin to solve all this mess.

How to clean up your email marketing database once and for all

Delete spam emails

The main principle in  cleaning your email marketing database  is to ensure that each and every contact on your list is a person who is genuinely interested in receiving your emails. Let's see what you can do to get it:

Identify hard bounces and remove those emails from your list forever . A bounced email is one that never reaches its destination. 

Within this category, we have soft bounces (the email cannot arrive due to a temporary problem, for example.The recipient's inbox is full or the server is down) and hard bounces (the email address or domain is already they do not exist, or the server has blocked your brand submissions).

Hard bounces are generally hopeless, so the best thing to do is remove those contacts from your database right away.

It makes it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe . Having more subscribers contributes absolutely nothing if they are not interested in your shipments. 

What's more, having uninterested subscribers can even hurt you, as they won't open your emails or can even mark you as spam. 

So it always pays to make it easy for them to unsubscribe with one click.

Find inactive users and offer them the opportunity to unsubscribe . Normally, your email marketing provider will allow you to see metrics such as the last conversion date, the last form submission or the last email opened or clicked. 

Thus, you will be able to detect contacts who have not had activity in the last year. My recommendation in these cases is that you confirm if they are still interested in receiving your emails and if not, do not hesitate to delete them from the database.

Detect poor quality contacts .

Sometimes email marketing databases include people who have simply attended an event or trade show, "guessed" emails based on company domain and format, or third party lists.

In general, these contacts have not explicitly agreed to be part of your database, so it is best to reconfirm their consent or delete them.

In some cases,  we see that we have serious deliverability problems with a database and we are unable to regain the trust of mail providers . 

In those cases, you may have to opt for a radical solution: create a new database from scratch and offer existing contacts the ability to re-subscribe to receive your emails. 

Logically, with this you risk losing a large percentage of your contacts, but sometimes it can be the cleanest solution.

Organize the data

Now that we have eliminated the people who really do not want to receive our emails, the next step is to  put  our remaining contacts in order . Let's see some recommendations to get it:

Correctly format inconsistent data . 

There are several standard fields of the forms that can give us problems: the first and last names, the telephone numbers, the postal addresses and the email addresses. 

The idea is to choose a single format for each of them and unify everything. We also have to be aware to remove unnecessary whitespace and unwanted characters.

Create  dropdowns with closed responses . 

For cases like the one we have discussed before about different names for the same position (CMO, marketing director, etc.). The easiest thing is to decide on a standard nomenclature and create a drop-down list in the form so that the user can choose the option that more fits your case.

Delete  duplicate contacts . 

In some cases, it is possible that we have the same person registered several times, especially if we have made imports, and it is even possible that that person is receiving our emails in duplicate or triplicate. 

So to finish, you also have to find and remove the duplicate data.

Good practices to keep your database clean

If you have followed the previous steps, you will have a much more efficient database.And you will see how  your deliverability, opening, clicks and conversions data improve , and with them the  ROI of your email marketing .

But so that all this work is not in vain, regular maintenance must be done  .

First of all, the recommendation is to repeat this cleaning process periodically, for example, once a month. As you will no longer be dealing with accumulated errors for years, it will take much less time than the first time. And this will ensure that your database is kept in top shape.

Second, it is always a good idea to apply a lead scoring strategy   to evaluate the health of our database and act efficiently.

Lead scoring

In short, lead scoring consists of designing and applying an algorithm that evaluates  the quality of the contacts in our email marketing database  and when they are in the process. 

For example, we can assign points based on their responses to the initial registration form or the actions they take, such as opening an email or clicking. Depending on the score a contact receives, we will have different scenarios:

Unqualified leads.  

This is where users who have a very low score and who do not interest us as potential customers at the moment would enter, so we can remove them from the database or include them in a low maintenance list.

Qualified leads for marketing . 

These contacts have an average score, so they would be ready to become part of our email marketing flows and receive communications.

Qualified leads for sales . 

The contacts with the highest scores are those that are ready to convert, so the action to take would be to send them personalized offers based on their interests.

In order to manage this entire process, it is essential to have a good marketing automation strategy   that allows you to automatically assign scores to contacts and send them to different lists according to their characteristics.