Spring List Cleaning 🧹

GM! Paperboy here 🗞️

If there’s one email I’d forward to your email agency or retention manager, it’s this one.

A few of my 8-figure clients expressed interest in more in-depth list cleaning systems during their off-seasons.

I've been going pretty deep into spam filtering & unengaged emails on Klaviyo over the last week. I’m sharing what we’re doing at Bedford to boost deliverability for our clients right now.

This is a v1 of our system, but I’m sure many of you can replicate parts of it. If you want to stay in the loop on further iterations, shoot me an email.

Note: You are burning money

Seriously.

Companies like Klaviyo, Attentive and Omnisend make it quite hard to do proper list hygiene.

They're incentivized to have you send more emails, and they do that by getting you to sign up more profiles for your newsletter. There are very few native tools for cleaning unengaged users.

Two things to remember:

1. Bad list hygiene → worse deliverability on your account → landing in the inbox less with new and existing customers

2. Bad list hygiene → more users in your account → more money you pay for email (worse ROI)

It’s not unrealistic that with proper list cleaning you can save 20-30% on your Klaviyo bill WITHOUT hurting revenue.

Here’s what I'm noticing

• Most big brands are getting hit with 5-10% fake emails on abandoned checkouts - almost all of these soft or hard bounce (deliverability hurt)

  • People are usually testing your checkout with fake emails to see what shipping or final prices look like

  • Some bad actors are also hitting your checkout's API to test your pricing, which is impossible to prevent given the gated nature of Shopify's checkout

• Our clients have lots of emails that are 6+ months old with 0 engagement (dead leads)

How I'm solving it (immediate):

• The moment an email comes in, I check if it's risky in two ways:

  • Pinging a list-cleaning API to validate all emails coming in

  • Checking MX records on emails coming in (Google has a free API for this)

    If it’s risky → immediately suppressed

• Rechecking risky emails 10-20 minutes later to flag any suspicious activity (on some accounts, bad emails get submitted twice)

• Running hot winback offers on dead leads to trigger some form of engagement (e.g. "mystery offer, click to reveal"). Ask yourself, 'If they don't engage with these, will they ever?'

What about all the people already on my list? The backwards solve:

• I'm performing bulk uploads to a list-cleaning co. every 3-6 months on unengaged profiles (no purchases, opens, or clicks in the past 3-6 months). I won’t shill any software, but email me and I’ll tell you the one I use.

• Sunset flow (list-clean API based on the above, on autopilot)

• Winback offers on very unengaged profiles, tested at different intervals to trigger engagement and validate whether they're real

• Deleting sketchy/unengaged emails (clients align on risk/reward) on a regular basis (quarterly or biannually, depending on size)

• Leveraging direct mail for unengaged emails. A lot of big brands miss this, and I think it’s a goldmine.

Beware of email software promising you the world

Inbox-placement boosters and identity-resolution software will hurt deliverability.

Unless your team is very sophisticated, stay away.

Otherwise you’ll quickly find yourself doing sketchy stuff that Gmail doesn’t like and end up with more emails in your account that hurt deliverability (a.k.a., back to the drawing board).

I’ve done some interesting AB tests with our bigger clients, which I’ll be sharing in an upcoming edition. Stay tuned.

Now go clean your lists!

Meme of the Week

That’s all for now,
Paperboy 🗞

If you need help with email & SMS, click here to learn about my agency. My team and I help scaling ecommerce brands.