Not practicing email hygiene is an outreach rookie mistake!
Effective email outreach requires a clean email list.
That’s because low-quality lists get low engagement.
This lack of engagement signals to email service providers that your emails aren’t of much value.
In other words, you look like a spammer!
ESPs then take measures by lowering your sender reputation.
Now it’s even harder to reach your prospects’ inbox, which leads to less engagement for your emails, which leads to even lower deliverability, which leads to…. you get the point!
It’s all downhill from here.
If you’re going to do email outreach, you must practice email hygiene, and we’ll show you how to do it below. ⬇️
How to practice email hygiene for more successful email outreach
Practicing email hygiene is all about doing a series of mostly recurring tasks.
Most of them can be classified as maintenance work.
The tasks are easy to execute but have a huge potential payoff.
So if you know you haven’t been practicing email hygiene, now is the time to start with the tasks below:
1. Verify your leads’ emails ✅
The first step to better email hygiene is only sending to verified email addresses.
Unverified emails can bounce, which can hurt your deliverability.
But even if they don’t…
And the email does get delivered…somewhere.
Unverified emails can be old email addresses that are no longer in use or catch-all email addresses that receive email but are never checked.
Thus, unverified emails can drag down your open rate, directly hurting your campaign’s success and affecting your deliverability for future campaigns.
The rule to avoid shooting yourself in the foot is simple: Only send to verified emails!
With lemlist, you can effortlessly find and verify the emails of your leads.
lemlist’s email finder and verifier works best if you have to verify a list of emails. For a quick check of a single email, use our free email checker.
2. Send better emails
Some might argue that your email’s content has nothing to do with email hygiene.
We disagree!
If your email looks like a cookie-cutter mass email, it will smell like spam… because it lacks (email) hygiene. 😉
To remove that smell, remember to do two things:
- Personalize your emails. What’s the number one sign of a cookie-cutter mass email? It’s not personalized! In other words, it’s an email that can be sent to thousands of people at once.
- Offer value in every email: Whether it’s a joke or funny picture that has your leads rolling over the floor, a revealing industry statistic, or a show of empathy with their most pressing pain points, make reading your email worth their while.
For more tips on how to write better emails, check out our guide on how to write an email like a pro.
3. Remove bounced emails from your list
Bounced emails hurt your deliverability, and thus you want to avoid them.
But let’s get real here:
We all get the occasional bounced email from time to time…even when sending to verified emails only. It’s inevitable if you send large quantities of emails.
But once a recipient turns out to be a bounce, you must stop sending to them. No more follow-ups!
Fortunately, most email automation tools automatically remove bounced leads from your list but make sure to double-check this for your tool.
4. Remove duplicate emails
Sending the same email twice to the same recipient could be seen as spam.
Regardless, it won’t leave a professional impression on your prospects. The impression might be lasting… but it won’t be a good impression.
lemlist has several features to help you prevent duplicate leads.
5. Remove inactive leads
After reaching out to a lead multiple times and not getting any sign of life (i.e.: your emails go unopened)…
It’s time to remove them from your leads list. Clearly, the only thing this lead will contribute to your outreach is decreasing your deliverability due to their lack of engagement!
Don’t just delete the lead. If you do that, you might accidentally add them back to your list later.
Instead, manually unsubscribe them.
lemlist…you guessed it…offers this feature, too. 😉
6. Make it easy for leads to unsubscribe
Including a clearly visible unsubscribe link is one of email outreach’s best practices.
It’s a win-win for everybody involved.
It makes it easy for prospects to unsubscribe and removes uninterested leads from your email list. This helps keep your list clean and increases your engagement rate.
But there’s something even more important:
If a prospect doesn’t like your email, they normally take either one of two actions:
- They click on unsubscribe
- They hit the spam button!
There’s no clearer sign of spam to ESPs than a recipient triggering the bomb of a spam complaint.
Try to avoid it at all costs.
One way is to include a clearly visible unsubscribe link above the fold.
It must stand out more than the spam button!
Key takeaways
- ➡️ Only send to verified email addresses
- ➡️ Ensure to unsubscribe stale or uninterested leads manually
- ➡️ Make it easy for your leads to unsubscribe and leave your list
