List Hygiene Gone Wild

What's list hygiene?

It's discussed using different terms list hygiene, culling your list, raking your list, keeping your list healthy, list maintenance, etc. Too many people mistakenly think it's one thing, removing contacts who are not engaged (therefore not interested) from your list. But there's more to it.

The purpose of list hygiene

• Improving email deliverability
  How many people open your emails and actively engage with them (click links, add you to contacts, etc.) tells email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. your emails are worthy of reaching the inbox. So of course you want to make sure that the people you're sending to will be acting on your messages.
• Increase your conversion rate
  It's simple math. If you reduce the number of people you're sending to, those who convert will be a greater percentage of those sent to. It's a legitimate argument that getting down to only your engaged contacts makes your conversion rate more accurate vs artificially depressed by inactive contacts who wouldn't convert anyway. We'll get to how you measure engagement shortly, because that's crucial.
• Lower the costs of marketing
  Nearly all email service providers charge based on the number of contacts you have. Getting this number down naturally reduces your costs. In some cases it can be a significant savings.

Do no harm

It's not just for doctors. That's a good motto for Marketers to keep in mind when managing clients as well. Removing people from your list a drastic step and should not be taken lightly. Yet I hear people proudly boasting how many people they've cut from their list overall or just recently.

When you really understand what's been done (with many, irrevocably), it's shameful that so much has been unnecessarily cut. Getting List Hygiene wrong can be like having a damaged finger and the doctor amputating up to the elbow!

A little knowledge can be very dangerous

With so much information, it's hard enough to know what's good and what's not. Too much emphasis has been placed on cutting the "dead weight" from the list, and that's what people take and run with.

On top of that, most of the information out there starts and ends with email opens as the criteria for engagement. Email opens are unreliable and therefore NOT a metric you should solely use to gauge activity, especially for taking drastic action such as removal.

Email opens are tracked by an image pixel. If your contacts have not chosen to show images in your emails (default is NOT), the open is not tracked. That's even if they're opening EVERY email you send!

Base your engagement on something you can accurately track, like a clicked link in email, and website visits. Make sure you have tracking set up properly (TEST it!) on your site. Then make sure you have a link for them to click in ALL of your emails and track those links.

Use the premade engagement automations in FunnelKits/ActiveCampaign. I can't recall if it has a field "Last Activity" or we made one afterward. If you need to add it, include an action to update that field with current time. But make sure to add the condition on the triggers "And custom field 'last activity' is NOT current date" so the activity log isn't filled with them going in and out of the engagement campaign for EVERY single activity.

Now you can track engagement and use an automation to handle those people based on their level on engagement. The first thing you should do is try to get them re-engaged, not just throw the baby out with the bathwater.

If you're going to measure activity to take drastic action on, be sure that data is accurate. Otherwise you're likely wasting all of the effort it took to get them on your list for no good reason. Take a holistic approach to measuring engagement using the premade engagement automations in FunnelKits/ActiveCampaign. And do more with people who take action. Tag and segment them so you can send them laser targeted messages they will want to get and most likely lead to more sales.