Managing your email database

By maintaining your database you can improve your open rates, increase deliverability and reduce sending costs. Email database maintenance includes a number of factors.

Managing Unsubscribers
It is a legal requirement that all emails have an unsubscribe function to allow your customers to opt-out of receiving communications. Many email broadcast systems manage this automatically for you by adding an unsubscribe link to each email and allowing your customers to send their unsubscribe request directly to the database.

You can keep track of the number of customers that unsubscribe after each email send, so it is good to keep an eye on this - watch for any spike in unsubscribe activity and look for possible reasons behind it.

While the facility to unsubscribe is often available via the email, some customers will choose to ring the contact centre or hit the ‘reply to’ button to unsubscribe – so ensure that your contact centre knows how to unsubscribe people from the database as well.

Managing Bouncebacks
Bouncebacks are emails that are rejected after being sent. These can be for various reasons, and most programs will distinguish ‘hard’ bouncebacks and ‘soft’ bouncebacks. Hard bouncebacks are emails that are rejected because there is a permanent error with the email address – i.e. the account does not exist. ‘Soft’ bouncebacks are when an email is temporarily undeliverable, caused by things such as a Hotmail account being full, or out of office reply.

Some email broadcast systems will automatically try and resend ‘soft bounce’ emails after the first bounce. Some also allow you to deactivate and/or delete both hard and soft bounces in bulk. How often you need to do this is determined by the cleanliness of your database and how often you send email communications.

Update Profile link
A great way to keep your database up to date is to add an ‘update profile’ link to your emails, so your customers can modify their own information in your database. This is a great way of not only allowing your customers to keep their information current, but it also allows you to see who your most engaged customers are - they are updating their information because they want to continue to hear from you!