Have You Cleaned Your E-mail List Lately?

[Dale King]

According to Forrester Research, each year 25% of email addresses on your list will go bad. By bad I mean undeliverables and opt-outs.

This means that if you aren't cleaning your list regularly, your e-mail marketing efforts are probably being wasted?

Which begs the question...have you cleaned your e-mail list lately?

Dale King

[Malok]

Heh. Not as recently as I probably should have.

I figure, if I send an email - and it comes back to me, then I can clean it. :)

[dbar]

Hi Dale,
How do you clean your email list? It sounds like you are doing this manually, but maybe I don't understand what you mean. Doesn't the software you are using have any way to automatically remove people who have opted out or when the email goes undeliverable. Thanks.

[jcboy460]

My software doesn't autoclean either. I am sure that would make it easier if it did. Just one more thing to add to the list of stuff I want.

[the-ref]

I don't think there is such thing as an 'auto-clean' feature for cleaning email lists. I think the only automated you can have are automated unsubscribe links where if the user clicks on it, their email address will be removed from your list.

I have dealt with both self-managed email lists and email list services and I have never heard or seen an auto-cleaning feature. As far as I know, there would be no way to determine this unless you kept sending everyone emails to see which ones bounce back.

Although, an auto-cleaning feature definitely be a cool to have :p

[jcdykes]

Does it make that much difference if your email is cleaned out or not? I am sure you will find out when you decide to send that person an email that it is no longer valid. Just seems like there might be better things to do with your time.

[tina.anderson]

It may be time wasted, but I am very obsessive about neatness and organization and I do clean my email list regularly, probably too often. I think it's a good idea to do it at least once every two months.