Email Hygiene: A Clean List Helps Keep Your Business Healthy

As many of us know, a seemingly small injury can seriously affect your overall health. While undeliverable email addresses may seem like a trivial problem, being unable to reach customers through email can have serious consequences on a business’s health.

Working email addresses are necessary for maintaining your relationship with your customers and retaining their loyalty. Yet according to an NFO World Group study, more than 30% of email addresses can change in a year to become undeliverable.

Bad emails get on your list because of people moving, changing jobs, switching Internet service providers, as well as from mistakes that occur during data entry. This significant churn rate leads to bouncing emails that harm your email reputation and your ability to deliver email to the inbox. The result is reduced response rates, lost sales opportunities, and increased costs.

There is a way to win the battle, however, simply by running your list through an email hygiene service that can identify invalid emails and fix them. The process is easy and inexpensive, and a high percentage of email addresses can be corrected immediately.

Customer email addresses are precious, and replacing lost email contacts is costly. As eMarketer and other studies show, acquiring a customer costs five to 10 times more than retaining one.

On the flip side, keeping customers is good for business on many levels. A 5% increase in retention yields profit increases of 25% to 100%, and repeat customers spend, on average, 67% more, according to Bain and Co. research.

With a clean email list, you’ll have fewer bounces, higher delivery, and improved response rates. Periodically performing email hygiene will pay for itself many times over, especially when you consider the number of working email addresses you will be able to save.

With the availability of email hygiene services, there is no reason to live with bad email addresses that can be fixed. Like the measures you take to preserve your personal health, email hygiene is a measure you can take to keep your business running at its most optimal level.