Email List Hygiene

To keep your email deliverability rate high, it’s important to remove inactive subscribers from your email list on a regular basis. Email services use customer activity data to select a destination folder for your emails, such as "Spam" or "Inbox".

If your subscribers don’t interact with your emails — e.g., they don’t open them or click on the links, frequently unsubscribe, or report spam — email services may decide to send your emails to the "Spam" folder.

If you keep sending emails to inactive subscribers, this can also result in the following:

1. Decreased deliverability to customers who are interested in your campaigns.
2. Your emails ending up in the "Spam" folder because of a damaged domain reputation.
3. A lower domain reputation, blacklisted IP addresses, and lower deliverability rate if the email falls into a spam trap.

How to migrate an email list from a third-party mailing service

If you are importing an email list taken from another mailing service, be sure to delete any inactive or invalid email addresses, using whatever data is available to detect them. For example, you can remove addresses with zero opens or clicks over the last 6 months, or to upload them as unsubscribed.

You can also use undelivered email data as well as invalid address data to avoid uploading such addresses and including them in your future email lists.

You will want to clean your email list before you send your first email campaign using Maestra, otherwise you risk damaging your domain reputation, lowering your deliverability rate, and getting your IPs blocked.

You will need to warm up your domain before sending your first email campaign, whether or not you have the subscriber activity data and address validity data.

You can read more about importing contacts in this article.

How to update an existing list

1. Segment your list by subscriber activity, based on the open and click data. Refer to this article to learn how to create segments.
2. Set up reactivation campaigns. You can reactivate your subscribers manually with a one-time bulk email or with an automatic email chain that includes subscribers after they meet your conditions.
3. Identify and remove those who have never opened or clicked on your emails. For example, you can set up a flow for a farewell email.
4. Set up automated address removal for customers who have had no activity such as clicks, email opens, website visits, or orders for an extended time period.

Refer to this article for more info on how to segment customers based on their activity.