Make things easy with email list management best practices

What is email list management?

Email list management is your strategy for managing your email contact list.

From a technical perspective, it’s how you:

• Build your email list.

• Maintain your mailing list hygiene.

• Perform email verifications and validations.

• Manage opt-in and unsubscribe options.

• Sunset disengaged users.

From a marketing perspective, it gives you a validated contact database to:

• Segment your mailing list by grouping readers with similar characteristics.

• Personalize your email content by sending targeted emails based on list segmentation.

• Filter email subscribers based on engagement levels.

• Send out re-engagement campaigns as needed.

Why is email list management critical?

Okay, at this point, you’re probably thinking, “Wait, isn’t it enough if I’ve carefully built an email list the right way?”

First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what the right way is. Getting new subscribers is more than half the battle, but you want to grow your list organically – not purchase existing lists or find covert ways to capture emails… but more on this later.

But even a well-built email list won’t deliver results if it’s not maintained properly.

You might have great content and beautifully designed templates, but if your list is cluttered with outdated or inactive contacts, your efforts could be in vain. As your small business evolves, so should your email list. Regular cleaning and management help keep your campaigns effective, your bounce rate low, and your emails out of junk folders.

Beyond the obvious, here’s why email list management matters:

• Better targeting and engagement. A smaller, more refined list typically leads to higher open and click-through rates. It also helps you better understand your audience and tailor content to their interests more effectively.

• Fewer bounces. If your list includes invalid or outdated addresses, your emails may hard bounce—hurting your sender reputation and flagging your domain as suspicious. While soft bounces won’t impact your sender reputation too much, a high hard bounce rate is a red flag for inbox service providers (ISPs). Don’t let ISPs flag your sending domain as spammy or malicious. They might refuse to place your messages in users’ inboxes because they think your emails contain malware.

• Improved deliverability. High engagement rates signal to ISPs that your content is wanted. This helps your emails land in the primary inbox rather than the spam folder.

• Reduced spam complaints. If you don’t make it easy for your readers to unsubscribe from your emails, they might just mark your messages as spam. Too many spam complaints – also known as abuse complaints – cause ISPs to flag your emails as spam. In the best case, you’ll land in the spam folder. In the worst case, you’ll land on a blocklist!

These issues directly impact your sender reputation and, ultimately, your deliverability. We’ll help you avoid landing in spam traps, winding up on blocklists, and being flagged by ISPs with email list management best practices.

6 email list management best practices

So how do you get ahead of email deliverability issues? Follow these best practices for list management:

Perform regular email address verifications

Keep your email list clean by ensuring the addresses on your list are valid email addresses. Email validation helps ensure that the addresses on your mailing list are valid and error-free, so they won’t bounce.

To make sure you have the right email addresses, you can add email validation to your sign-up forms. Want to try it for yourself? Check out our email verifications tool.

Keep tabs on email bounces

Watch out for soft and hard bounces. You'll need to update your mailing list if you’re sending messages and they bounce back.

With ISP feedback and automatic suppressions, you can continually monitor and make updates to your email list to improve open rates for your email campaigns and protect your reputation. Keep your delivery rates high by removing email addresses that bounce back messages before you send out your next email marketing campaign.

Use double opt-in measures

Reduce the number of invalid addresses on your mailing list using sign-up forms with double opt-in measures. This is a great way to ensure addresses are correct and your readers want to receive your emails.

Have clear unsubscribe options

Make it easy for your readers to unsubscribe. It’s always sad to see them go but trust us; you’d much rather say goodbye than have them mark your emails as spam. Clear unsubscribe links make list management a self-serve function. Disinterested users will become unengaged subscribers, and that dilutes your target audience by impacting your deliverability.

Implement a sunset policy

Not all users will be lifelong users. Developing a sunset policy gives you a playbook to plan re-engagement strategies around low engagement users, and creates a process for retiring inactive users that are hurting your engagement metrics.

Don’t buy email lists

Effective email list management starts with building a solid list of engaged contacts who actually want to hear from you. Buying or renting email addresses isn’t just a poor investment – it can hurt your deliverability and reputation. Instead, focus on permission-based lists where users opt in to receive your emails. The best email marketing tools support this approach and help you manage your list with compliance and precision.

Final thoughts

List management is a mission-critical email marketing tool. Regardless of the platform you use to send, be it Mailgun, Mailchimp, Hubspot, or some other email marketing software, list hygiene helps to ensure a higher open rate with a lower bounce rate, and way less chance of landing in the spam folder. Whether you decide to manage your mailing list yourself or use email list management tools and strategies, remember that a clean email list is vital to a healthy ecommerce email campaign.

Ready to get cracking? Try Mailgun’s email validation tools and check out our other email tools to improve your email campaigns and boost your reader engagement. And don’t worry, if you have questions, we’ve got you covered for all your digital marketing efforts from your welcome email to your transactional email program.