Maintaining a healthy mailing list is essential to running successful email campaigns. This help article outlines what it means to be healthy, what you can do to keep your list healthy, and how Direct Mail can help.
What is "Healthy"?
A mailing list is healthy if:
- You obtain opt-in consent from contacts before adding them to your list
- You send content that is relevant to what contacts consent to
- You send content that is engaging (i.e. leads to opens and clicks)
- You honor unsubscribe requests promptly
- You regularly remove inactive contacts
Start Healthy
From the start, make sure that you only add contacts to your list that meet our mailing list requirements. If you are not sure whether your list meets the requirements, please contact our support team. Please keep in mind:
- If you are importing your list from an other email service, make sure that you exclude contacts that unsubscribed, bounced, or reported a spam complaint
- If you have an email sign-up form on your website, make sure it is secured against bots and spammers (our form builder does this for you)
Handle Unsubscribes, Bounces, and Complaints
Contacts that have unsubscribed, hard bounced, or reported a spam complaint should not be sent to again. Direct Mail handles this for you automatically by skipping over contacts in your list that have unsubscribed, hard bounced, or complained. When importing contacts into your list, Direct Mail ensures that hard bounce and unsubscribe information is preserved. Do not circumvent this process by creating new projects or lists and populating them with contacts that had already unsubscribed from your campaigns.
Unsubscribe Inactive Contacts
Consider removing (or unsubscribing) people from your list who have gone inactive. Inactive (or "unengaged") means that perhaps they have not opened an email from you in over a year. Your list may be smaller, but you'll be reaching the people who really are interested.
Before removing inactive contacts, consider sending
Here's how to identify inactive contacts:
- Navigate to the Contacts tab
- Select your list
- Click in the Search field in the toolbar
- Choose Inactive from the menu that appears
The search results will show Contacts that have not opened a campaign from you in the past 12 months.
Before removing inactive contacts, you may consider sending a targeted campaign to win them back. Contacts that remain inactive can be removed in any of the following ways:
- Delete them from your list
- Unsubscribe them (check the "Unsubscribed" box in the inspector)
- Exclude them (check the "Excluded" box in the inspector)
- Move them from your list into different list that you will never send to
- Move them from your list into a blacklist. Note that if you choose this option, they will not receive emails so long as they are on the blacklist, even if they subscribe to your main list again in the future.