List hygiene or maintaining clean distribution lists means that your lists are composed of real emails of people who have opted in to receive messages from you. Now, why is it important to maintain clean less? Well, it's super important because otherwise you could be marked as spam. your emails may not be delivered and your customers won't see your campaigns. So how do we keep things clean, remove hard bounces and unsubscribe immediately. By law, you have 10 days to do that work.

But as a best practice, I would recommend do it within 24 hours or 48 hours at the most. Let's say you unsubscribe from a company's emails, but you get another email from them a few days later. Just because that company had 10 days to do that work. Well, that's a terrible customer experience. In terms of hard bounces, that could mean that the email address was simply misspelled. So in that case, you can just correct it.

Watching soft bounces closely, or removing them completely. So a soft bounce means it's temporarily unable to be delivered to a particular inbox, maybe it's full. But whatever the reason you choose if you want to remove that email entirely, or you can just watch it over time. You can lessen frequency to inactive recipients. So those are people who are less engaged than your usual recipient. Or alternatively, you can decide to stop, stop emailing them completely, or include them ONLY IN YOUR BEST OFFERS and try to reengage them that way.

Offer a preference center so subscribers can receive only the emails that they actually want, using a double opt in process, which means that someone signs up for an email through your website. That's a single often and then an E Email is triggered to their inbox, they have to click on the verification link. That's the double opt in. A lot of marketers probably don't like this method because you don't see as high numbers compared to a single opt in process. But it is absolutely a good practice, should you choose to go that route. Now segmenting third party subscribers, I have bolded this one here because this is a high recommendation of mine that when you do enter into partnerships and receive email subscribers, through those collaborations that you somehow mark those subscribers as separate from your others.

So let's say that you have a clothing brand. And you've just struck up this amazing partnership with Nordstrom. So part of the agreement with Nordstrom gives you a bunch of new email subscribers, but the thing is those people have not signed up directly for your brand they've received and agreed to receive partner emails from North instead. So in this case, you can either send them an engagement campaign and just say, Hey guys, you know, just want to make sure that you opt in and so you're getting that direct opt in yourself. Or you can just fly them in the system separately so that you can see where they signed up and how they entered your overall list. Lastly, ensure a minimum 95% deliverability rate.

I say that ideally this number should be above 98%. But typically the research will say 95. And then finally, don't buy lists. For anyone who even suggests it repel repel