The Mad Slasher’s Guide to Email List Cleaning

As tempting as it may be to send your promotional emails to everyone in your address book, it’s just not practical…or wise.  Sometimes, it’s just plain stupid.  (I mean, how irritating is it when people send  email invitations to events or parties in MANILA to their friends in other countries?  Like they’ll be able to come???)

Also (more importantly) list hygiene plays a HUGE role in email delivery.  Many ISP’s have been known to block senders’ email domains forever for repeatedly sending messages to nonexistent email addresses.  (Believe me, you don’t want that.) 

Always remember:  Relevance is key to email marketing success. When it comes to email marketing (or any form of direct marketing), list QUALITY beats QUANTITY any day. Send only to people that might actually be interested, or benefit from, whatever it is you have to offer. 

In my experience, it’s usually in your best interests to go on ”Mad Slasher” mode when it comes to list cleaning - no matter how painful this may be. It’s pretty simple, really.  When in doubt, DELETE.

There are many ways to clean your lists, and the method will always depend on list size and source.  Huge lists from corporate databases require special treatment, but for smaller lists, here are a few useful tips you can use to “clean house” :

Manual Slashing: Slash unrecognizables (i.e, “who the heck is this?”-type email addies), duplicates and potential Spam reporters.

• Export your email address list/s (from wherever you keep them) and merge them into an Excel file.  Delete any unnecessary columns that might have been exported.  You only really need names and email addresses to begin with.

• Go through your list, and delete any unrecognizables, ”unknowns” and other undesirables you might have picked up along the way.  Tip: The less likely a person is to remember you or your company, the more likely he or she will report your email as Spam. 

• If you have more than one email address for certain contacts, pick just one and delete the rest.

• After you’ve cleaned out the undesirables and unnecessaries, copy and paste just the email address column into a separate worksheet, and use this cool tip I learned from Mailchimp to clean out any leftover duplicates:  Click here to view the tip in PDF format (you might want to save it).

Automated Slashing:  Use this 2-step method to  further clean up your list:

STEP 1: Get rid of bad/invalid email addresses by using an email address verifier.  An email address verifier (a.k.a. email validator) is a tool you can import your list into, which tests each email address’ validity by connecting directly to its SMTP server and checking it for you. Nothing is sent to the recipient.

Try Dynamic Email Validator or  Advanced E-mail Verifier - both are free.  Personally I prefer the latter, but the free version only allows you to run 100 addresses at a time, and doesn’t allow you to export the results.  Dynamic’s free version allows 500 email addresses at a time, and lets you save valid, invalid, and unconfirmed addresses as separate files.

Here’s what to do:

• Save your surviving email address list as a Text (tab delimited) file.  
• Import your list into an email address verifier, and run the software.
• Save the valid email addresses, and delete the rest

Note:  Email validators can’t verify free email addresses like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc, so don’t bother running those. You’ll have to save them for Step 2.  

STEP 2:  Send a WEEDING OUT email campaign to identify any other invalid addresses (they’ll bounce), and allow any uninterested contacts to unsubscribe before you send out your first real email promotion or newsletter. 

Here are a couple of “weeding out” email samples you can adapt to suit your own purposes:

• Tsukiji  ’Personal Invitation”  - sent to personal contacts of the owner
• San Francisco Cafe “Corporate Invitation” - sent to addresses from business cards collected at SFC outlets

(You can actually also just use a plain text email for this purpose.)

Important: To do Step 2 without making yourself crazy, I suggest you use email software or a hosted email service provider that allows for automated bounce handling and unsubscribes.  (See my previous post about ESP reviews for some suggestions. They all offer free trials.)

Is it a hassle?  YES!   But is it a waste of time?  Definitely NOT.  So start slashing away!