Why Email Hygiene is Important for Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Email marketing is not something new to any business, as most businesses use this very cost-effective means to reach their customers promptly and easily. Customer relationship management (CRM) on the other hand is what you need to manage all interactions with your real and potential customers.

Both seem not to be related, but they actually work to convert MQLs and SQLs into authentic and viable customers. The survival of any business depends on the client base and to build a viable client base, you need frequent interactions with your customers.

This is where the email marketing campaign comes to the front burner as one of the cheapest means of interacting with customers. In conjunction with the CRM system, you can rest assured of keeping track of the communications between you and your customers.

However, your email deliverability has a lot to do with the working of your CRM system; it’s only when your emails hit the inbox of customers that you can be certain that you are really communicating. Successful email campaigns have to do with email hygiene, which is the process of cleaning your email list to remove inactive subscribers.

Why do you need email hygiene?

Your email list is the best way to ensure CRM; when you just send out emails and your business can become endangered, there is every need to be cautious. Email hygiene, which is also known as email scrubbing, ensures that you don’t have invalid email addresses.

Email marketing campaigns often focus on subject lines, quality content, and probably enticing incentives, however, how accurate is your email list? Are you actually interacting with your client base? How are you ensuring that your CRM system is viable?

You need up-to-date data in your email list, and only email hygiene can guarantee that. Email hygiene without any doubt is the most critical factor in ensuring that your CRM system works perfectly and that your email marketing campaign rests assured.

Some metrics you need to verify if you need to embark on email hygiene

Fortunately, you can still ensure that your CRM system is working perfectly by deploying some metrics to check if you need to embark on email hygiene and how often. Some of these metrics include:

1. Open rates 

Open rates are the fundamental metric that you need to understand how reputable your email messages are. You should be having a high open-rate across all ISPs, if this is not the case, there must be a deliverability issue and this can even be the case with specific ones. 

When your sender’s reputation is at risk, building loyalty and trust becomes very difficult and the essence of interaction with customers which you need the CRM system for is jeopardized.

2. Bounce rates  

Your email bounce rate, especially when it’s a hard bounce, is an indication of what can possibly happen to your deliverability; a spike definitely means there is a problem; this goes to indicate that deliverability, as well as open rates, will be affected in the future. This is also an indication that your sender’s reputation has problems.

3. Spam/complaint rates  

Spam rates also work in handy with bounce rates to determine if your deliverability rate is declining or has already declined. You also use this metric to discover how strong your sender’s reputation is. 

Even when you have checked your metrics and everything seems to be working out fine, it does not mean that you still don’t need to employ email hygiene, you may need email hygiene for any of the following reasons: 

• Regular email hygiene ensures that your deliverability and sender reputation are in top gear; if you fail to do this, you may not quickly notice when your subscribers become inactive, which will lead to a decline in your sender’s reputation and deliverability. 

• Your sender reputation must be prioritized; email hygiene ensures that both your sender reputation and deliverability improve drastically; when you constantly remove stale addresses from your email list, the overall result is that you have a clean email list and this will enhance your CRM system.

For effective customer relationship management, how regularly must you clean your email lists?

This to a great extent depends on what you want to achieve; nobody has set out any hard rules for email hygiene; it all depends on how you want to be relevant in the market and the extent of competition you believe you have to overcome. The overriding factor that will determine how often you embark on email hygiene is simply your mindset and the metrics you have incorporated. 

Some marketers do this every three months; some even believe it must be done every six months; if, however, you can do it every week, you have better chances of ensuring that your CRM system is working perfectly. Do your email hygiene as often as it’s possible for you. 

Your customer relationship management software is already available to help in creating customer profiles, tracking customer interactions, managing sales, and marketing campaigns, analyzing customer information, and forecasting future spending; if you don’t clean out your email lists you will find it difficult to ensure that any customer relationship management software you deploy works to perfection. 

Incidentally, a lot of email hygiene practices are easy, and you don’t need to expend so much to implement them. Another advantage is that they are not time-consuming. You get value for any amount of funds you sink in, and human resources are very minimal.

How does spam impact CRM? 

The essence of CRM is to enhance quality interactions with your business and your customers. Email hygiene ensures that you are free from spam. 

Your revenue, deliverability, and email reputation are all affected by the level of spam you get. When you keep sending emails to inactive subscribers, you are endangering your business. 

People who are not interested in receiving emails from you may lodge spam complaints, and your ISPs will record you as a non-reputable sender. This may lead to your ISPs flagging your emails and diverting them to the spam folder.

Conclusion

It doesn’t augur well for any business to have poor interactions with customers; CRM enhances quality interactions; email hygiene ensures that you are actually interacting with active customers. Inactive addresses may signal your ISPs to flag you as spam. 

You need to constantly clean your email lists to avoid recycled spam traps from your ISPs, which they use to find out when you are sending emails indiscriminately.