How to maintain list hygiene?

List hygiene is a process involving recommended practices meant to maintain or improve the quality of your list. In your GetResponse account, it’s also the name of a feature that gives you the ability to remove and block contacts from your lists.

Note: it’s best not to limit your list hygiene activities to the options that we offer in the List Hygiene feature.

List hygiene practices include, but are not limited to:

• regularly removing inactive contacts that haven’t engaged in your content for more than 3-6 months
• blocking any undesirable email addresses and domains that can negatively impact your mailing performance
• making sure that you don’t send multiple copies of the same message to a single subscriber – over time, this can cause blocks resulting in bounces.
• ensuring that your list is not populated with bot traffic or fake addresses, which can be achieved with the addition of reCaptcha and double opt-in respectively.

The list hygiene process starts even before contacts make it into your account. Before you import them, you need to make sure that your list is permission-based. Avoid adding contacts just to increase your list size. It’s all about quality, not quantity.

Taking care of the quality of your contact database improves deliverability, increases open and click rates, and fosters customer engagement.

Please screen your list for undesirable addresses before you upload it. Remove bounces, unsubscribed, and invalid addresses.

What should you do to make sure that your list quality remains high

Get rid of non-engaged contacts on a regular basis

Each and every list, no matter how engaged, contains some contacts that show no signs of activity. They don’t click links or open your messages. There may be several reasons for this – in most cases, the email address was likely abandoned, which eventually will result in the inbox being deleted, causing user-unknown bounces. Since most ISPs tend to focus on engagement metrics in order to classify messages, it’s crucial that your engagement is as high as possible so your messages are not identified as spam.

With the above in mind, it is extremely important that you conduct regular list hygiene and remove all 3-6 month non-openers from your lists as soon as possible

Never try to trick your contacts into staying on the list

You should avoid the following practices:

• hiding the unsubscribe link
• making the opt-out process harder than it should be
• adding your own unsubscribe link to your GetResponse messages as they already contain one by default. Note: You may instead add an additional GetResponse unsubscribe link by including [[remove]] in the body of the message, preferably at the top.

If someone decides to leave your list, they will do this one way or another. For instance, if someone isn’t able to unsubscribe the regular way, they will most likely resort to reporting your message as spam in order to stop getting messages from you.

Keep your audience warm with regular communication

Emailing your audience regularly helps prevent disengagement and ensures that your contacts remember who you are. Sporadic communication increases the risk that subscribers forget they signed up, which can lead to unsubscribes and spam complaints. There is no single “correct” frequency – it depends on your industry and audience – but a good baseline is to send at least a few times a year. If that’s not possible, make sure you send a reactivation campaign before resuming full mailings.

Think twice before importing old, unengaged lists

If you’re moving your contacts from another platform, it’s important to evaluate the quality of that list first. Avoid importing contacts who haven’t engaged in the last 3–6 months – especially if you haven’t emailed them recently. Low-quality imports can harm your sender reputation and GetResponse account health.
Removing unengaged addresses not only improves deliverability and engagement but also saves costs – since GetResponse charges based on the total number of contacts in your list.

Fixing a stale list is sometimes possible through a reactivation campaign

If you’d rather not remove non-engaged contacts but you can still see signs of fatigue in your list, you might want to consider running a reconfirmation campaign.

You can leave all active contacts out of this send. It’s a good idea to offer some extra incentive for those who reconfirm. This can be a promo code, a freebie, anything that you assume would work for your contacts. After a few days, remove those who never confirmed.

Please note that this should only be done for lists that have been receiving at least semi-regular mailings from you – this will not work for segments that haven’t been contacted at all in many months or years – in such case, messaging these addresses will most likely result in a large amount of user-unknown bounces.

Should I block non-engaged contacts?

You should only block those emails and domains that you want to prevent from re-subscribing, or from being added to your list. We recommend you use your own discretion when creating blocklisting rules. Non-engaged contacts should not be blocked, only removed after a certain time of inactivity. They might decide to re-subscribe, and this way they’ll be free to join your list again.