17 tips for cleaning your email database

Email marketing is one of the dynamic promotional tools that can create a connection with your customers. When used effectively, email marketing will increase customer loyalty and establish you as an authority in your business niche. To improve the effectiveness of email marketing programs, you should constantly clean up your email database to ensure that only real contacts receive your emails.

Practicing a good cleaning of your email database will help you protect your brand and online reputation. ISPs are constantly on the lookout for unkempt and corrupted email databases in order to give them low reputation scores that ultimately affect delivery speed.

How to clean up your email marketing database

There are several methods you can use to clean up the database and check your email list. Some of the methods include using third-party software configured to identify and resolve undelivered, duplicate, invalid, and BOT email data.

Remove duplicates and incorrectly formatted addresses

Duplicate email addresses allow the recipient to receive multiple emails from you with the same content. Incorrectly formatted email addresses either deliver emails to the wrong person or fail altogether. In both cases, the recipient may react negatively to your marketing campaign or see that you are careless and ineffective in your activities, which damages your reputation.

Purge email addresses by role

Role-assigned account email addresses representing departments within the business organization, not individuals. When your marketing list is filled with email addresses like info, admin, sales, enquiry, and many more, it becomes ineffective. This is because the organization is undergoing changes that may affect the validity of email address roles. In addition, some role account addresses are associated with computer programs rather than individuals.

Keyword cleaning

This is the practice of cleaning up your email database by removing non-converting keywords from your list. Some targeting keywords include spam, offensive terms, junk, and keywords that are very long. Also, if you're running a geo-targeted campaign, you may need to scrape keywords that aren't specific to the region you're running your campaign in. This ensures that only targeted recipients receive your promotional messages.

Creating an email bounce register

Whenever you send emails, not all of them get delivered. There are various reasons why emails do not reach. Some of the reasons may be related to servers where some URLs are blocked due to filtering issues and authentication errors. If the recipient is unknown or the domain is not found, the mail server may permanently reject the email message. To clean up the database, create a bounce email registry that filters out such email addresses.

Use a complaint list

Not all emails you send in your marketing campaign are opened. Some of them are considered spam or unsolicited emails by recipients.

When this happens, your email delivery speed slows down and your message doesn't reach the intended recipients as a result. To solve this problem, you need to clear your email database to exclude such email contacts, so you are only left with those who are interested to open and read your emails. The list of complainers can help you with the cleanup process. This list is populated by all recipients who do not open your emails because they have reported them as spam.

Purge disposable email addresses

Disposable email addresses are used by spammers and disposable visitors to sign up for your marketing campaign instead of their primary and valid email addresses.

The danger that disposable addresses pose is that they affect the speed at which your emails are delivered to genuine subscribers. Over time this can create a domino effect where your real email recipients become inactive and cold towards your company due to not receiving your emails on a regular basis. You need to isolate and identify these email addresses and remove them from your list.

Email validation is very important when validating an HTML form

An email is a string (a subset of ASCII characters) divided into two parts by the @ character, "personal_info" and a domain, i.e. personal_info@domain. The personal_info part can be up to 64 characters and the domain name up to 253 characters.

The personal_info part contains the following ASCII characters.

• Uppercase (A-Z) and lowercase (a-z) letters of the English alphabet.
• Numbers (0-9).
• Characters ! # $ % & ' * + - / = ? ^ _ ` { | }~
• Character . (dot, dot, or fullstop) provided that it is not the first or last character, and it will not come one after the other.

The domain name [for example com, org, net, in, us, info] part contains letters, numbers, hyphens and dots.

Example of a valid email ID

• mysite@ourearth.com
• my.ownsite@ourearth.org
• mysite@you.me.net

Invalid Email ID Example

• mysite.ourearth.com [@ missing]
• mysite@.com.my [ tld (top-level domain) cannot start with a dot "." ]
• @you.me.net [ no character before @ ]
• mysite123@gmail.b [ ".b " is not a valid tld ]
• mysite@.org.org [ tld cannot start with a period."" ]
• .mysite@mysite.org [ Email must not start with "." ]
• mysite () * @gmail.com [ regex here only allows characters, numbers, underscores and dashes ]
• mysite..1234@yahoo.com [double dots not allowed]