Email marketing is one of the most profitable ways that you can market your Shopify store. For every $1 that you spend on email marketing, you can often find returns of about $38. There are many apps that can help you build your mailing list, for example, there is Sales Rocket and Vitals. These are good apps that offer numerous functions.

However, there aren’t many apps that can help you clean your email marketing list. And this is a really important task that needs to happen at least every three months. GetResponse integrates with Shopify and can also help you clean your email marketing list.

Integrating Shopify social media and digital marketing strategies can also complement your email marketing efforts, enhancing overall engagement and ROI.

Key Takeaways
1
Remove hard bounces immediately; soft bounces after 3-6 months of consistent non-delivery.
2
Use re-engagement campaigns for inactive contacts, offering incentives like discounts to rekindle interest.
3
Delete contacts unresponsive to re-engagement campaigns to maintain a cost-effective, high-ROI email list.

Why Is It Important to Clean Your Email Marketing List?

When you have a large email marketing list, sending content to these people periodically is going to be expensive. However, not everyone is going to open your emails. In fact, most people won’t. The best open rates within e-commerce are only at 30-35%. While these are the same contacts all the time, some contacts on your list just aren’t engaging with your content.

Getting rid of these people who aren’t engaged with your content can help reduce costs for your campaigns, earning you more profit and higher ROIs. Reallocating your efforts to attract more traffic to your site can further enhance your overall marketing strategy. In addition, if you’re sending out lots of mail that is bouncing, this can harm your email server’s reputation. Therefore, regularly cleaning your list is very important, which is why GetResponse has it built into their email marketing software that integrates with Shopify.

How to Clean Your List

Here is a quick guide to how you can clean your email marketing list if you’d like to do it yourself instead of using an integration like GetResponse.

Step 1 - Identify Those Contacts That Bounce

The first thing to do is to identify the contacts on your list that haven’t received your emails. There are two types of bouncing (when the email is rejected) when it comes to email marketing: hard and soft. All hard bouncing should be removed immediately, these email addresses either no longer exist or the email server blocked your emails.

Soft bounces are typically a temporary block; possibly from an email account being stuffed or a problem within the contact’s server. This can be overcome in time, but not always. If the contact has soft bounced for three-six months consistently, then the mailbox isn’t in use.

Step 2 - Send Out Re-engagement Campaigns

Next, you can send all other non-responses a re-engagement campaign. This is where you give those who haven’t opened an email within the last three months a special email enticing them back. You can include a coupon or discount code for participating to encourage them to come back.

A re-engagement campaign can consist of between one and three emails.

Step 3 - Remove Old Contacts

Anyone who doesn’t respond to your re-engagement campaign should be deleted off the mailing list. While it is sad to lose contacts, at the same time, it is important to only send emails to those who are useful contacts.