Data Hygiene for Email & SMS Marketing: Maintaining a Clean, High Converting List - EP 22

The idea of data hygiene, which is basically removing invalid, unengaged, or spammy contacts to your list to stay healthy and engaged, it's really there because not only wasting money, but you're also really there to protect your deliverability because, well, without deliverability, none of the stuff that we do matters.

SMS is expensive. It's kind of on the other side where it costs a lot more. So with this, if you're not mindful of who you're sending to and why you're sending and kind of having a good reason to back it up and make a case for it, your costs can add up really quickly. Yo dude, you guys Getting ready for Vegas over there?

Yeah, I am. I'm excited about our Shop Talk next week.

Dude, that's awesome. I know there's a lot of hype around it. I've never been. Is it, is it worth the hype? Does it live up to the hype?

You know, it's, it's an excuse to go to Vegas. It is a lot of people and you can run into a lot of cool networking and connections there. And it's also just a great place to reconnect with your friends. It seems like the place where, especially in the tech world, you see a lot more, I think, than even the brand side. But Just a lot of events, a lot of networking. You get to play, play a lot, and then you get to work hard. So a little bit of excuse, a little bit of fun, a little bit of work, but I anticipate that I'll get some good stuff going there.

Nice. Can't wait to hear about it.

Yeah, absolutely, man. Well, let's go ahead and shoot this pod. We got a good one here about data hygiene. I know it's not the sexiest topic in the world, but it's really important and more people are talking about more than ever lately. So let's get into it. You ready?

Let's do it.

All right, in 3, 2, 1.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.

What is up everyone? Welcome to Send It, where we discuss Everything and anything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing in e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host.

Chase Diamond.

Chase, we're back here, episode 22. We're talking about data hygiene for email and SMS marketing and we're really talking about maintaining a clean, high-converting list ultimately. We know how important that is in today's environment. And so we're gonna go dive deep into this and do a whole pod on this where we are gonna talk about all the overlooked things, things that you can be thinking about, things to think about in the future, and things that can make or break your campaigns really around deliverability and hygiene. At the end of the day, I think the biggest thing that I think about is a good list, email or SMS, is going to be hygienic and it's going to create high converting and it's going to be cost efficient too. So let's dive into this. Before we even get into it, for those that don't know why data hygiene is important, because some people will be like, oh yes, I'm excited about this, but let's get into it first to make sure that we're teaching people. Chase, I'm gonna start off with the first question at the top. Why does data hygiene matter so much for e-commerce brands?

Yeah, there certainly is a lot. I'd say kind of the 3 primary that we think about and focus on, and really kind of starting with the most important. Number one, your favorite topic, deliverability, right? The clean list is essential for improving and maintaining A, a strong sender reputation, and B, with that, really ensuring that your emails are landing in kind of the inbox, not the spam folder, but the actual kind of primary folder of the inbox, the promotions at the very least, and never the spam. That's number one. Number 2 is your brand's reputation's really on the line. If you're sending kind of emails to folks that are disengaged or invalid contacts, you really risk having higher spam complaints, unsubscribes, and even emails that are gonna bounce. And then 3rd, which is a really big one as well, it provides a cost savings. So email and SMS platforms, they're typically charging based on your subscriber account, right? So if you have, you know, just your active people there and fewer inactive or fake contacts, that means you're paying less money. So your list is gonna be healthier, you're gonna be able to inbox better, and you're saving money. Like that is the trifecta.

No, exactly. And that's just, that's just not about the numbers. It's quality over quantity. And I think this is something that's changed a lot in this market over the last couple years. I know you and I have, we've been in email marketing for so long, But there was a time where we cared about our list size and now we care about our list engagement, right? A small but engaged list can outperform a huge list of uninterested subscribers ultimately. And, you know, the idea of data hygiene, which is basically removing invalid, unengaged, or spammy contacts to your list to stay healthy and engaged, it's really there because not only wasting money, but you're also really there to protect your deliverability because, well, Without deliverability, none of the stuff that we do matters.

Dude, 100%.

I hope you're enjoying the pod, but I wanna stop you for just 30 seconds and tell you about something very special that Jimmy and I have been working on. Between the two of us, we have over 20+ years of experience in email marketing, and when we teamed up to do this pod, we realized that we had an even bigger opportunity to put our minds together and create a certification program that takes our 20+ years of knowledge and be able to share with the world. That's why we created the Ecom Email Certified, an end-to-end course and certification program that's designed to take anyone, regardless of whether you're a newbie or an experienced marketer, founder, executive, agency owner, or any marketing professional, to teach them everything we know about email and SMS marketing, from deliverability to AI to copywriting to design to strategy and so much more. We literally cover it all. It's loaded with 175 modules. Yes, 175 modules, which is over 25+ hours of education that's combined with quizzes as well as a community. And it's all designed to educate, test, and certify you or your team members to be a full-fledged email marketer for e-commerce. And since you're listening to this pod, we wanna reward you and say thank you for your loyalty by giving you a special coupon code for $100 off the certification. Jump over to ecomemailcertified.com and use the coupon code SENDIT. That's S-E-N-D-I-T, no space, and join our certification program today.

Now back to the pod. So why don't we start with talking about cleaning your list? Do you mind breaking down, and I'll kind of share a couple as well, but do you mind kind of breaking down the first kind of tactic for, you know, why it's important? Like what's, what's the go-to method essentially for cleaning your list?

Yeah, dude. Let's start with the basics, man. And I think the most basic thing out there that people don't think about, or they think about it sometimes, but they don't want to admit it sometimes, is really identifying and removing inactive subscribers. So let's start with the most basic strategy because I think let's kind of walk people through it, right? The first strategy is very simple. One of the things that I see brands that don't have very often is a sunset flow. Ultimately, for people who haven't opened or clicked in, let's say, 60 to 90 days for a prospect, maybe a little bit longer for customers, you need to be getting in front of them at that point because you've got to make a decision. So you've got to give them a chance to either re-opt in and confirm that they still want to hear from you, or if they don't engage, it's time to remove and suppress them. You know, that's one way to kind of think about it because, you know, making sure that you are getting a last chance is really important. Another way that I think is even more popular as we look into the future and something that I'm starting to see more and more brands do right now is double opt-in or the confirmed opt-in, right? I think that that word has changed a little bit. People used to call it the double opt-in and now they're calling it confirmation or confirmed opt-in. But it's essentially when a new subscriber actually wants to receive your emails. It helps filter out things like bots and fake signups and typos, which is like one of the biggest things that I see in this market right now. And the reality is it's becoming more and more normalized than ever. I think consumers are getting more and more used to it. I know when you sign up for an app and often They'll be like, oh, check your email to go make sure that, you know, you got that email, confirm that this is a real email. This habit is now becoming normalized. And I see big brands, even like brands like Liquid Death, for example, are starting to add this into their flows. Chase, I mean, that's 2 of the ways that I can think about it. But what about you, man? What are you thinking about tactics when you think about email list cleaning?

Yeah, absolutely. I'd say something that's not really talked about a lot that we're kind of seeing happen in other markets, specifically around like kind of lead gen. Right? Like those guys are, are really kind of on top of it and, and they're with it cuz frankly they have to be, it's part of their business. But really what they're doing well that a lot of folks in e-com especially aren't doing is they're regularly validating their email addresses, right? So there's tools like Zero Bounce or NeverBounce, you know, there's a million and one of these at this point that can kind of verify your email addresses. And what you want to do is you want to kind of import or upload these lists that you have periodically. To run checks that are gonna be able to tell you, okay, this specific email is invalid, or this is a disposable address. And this way, right? Like you can clean them off your main list ASAP, right? So if you have a way to even do that in real time, that's even better. That way they don't even join your list. So that's number one. Number 2 would be you can also segment by levels of engagement. And I know it's simple, but the reality is many brands still aren't using segmentation very well. And I know that we had a great pod on this in the past. I recommend anyone, you know, wants to learn more about segmentation, go dive into that. Jimmy, can we link that in the show notes or somewhere? 'Cause I know it was a great one.

Yeah, we'll throw it in the show notes for sure. This is—

we'll drop that.

That was one of our highest listened pods, believe it or not, was about segmentation.

Yeah, it's a good one for sure. And then kind of to keep going, you know, on top of that, right? When you create segments, for example, like highly engaged, so Let's say someone that has opened or clicked in the last 30 days versus someone that's quote unquote at risk for folks that have not opened or clicked in the last 60 days. Right. So those are kind of some examples. And of course, like we recommend here that you take your kind of prospects and customers and split them up. You want to treat them differently, send them different campaigns, different offers, et cetera, because different things are going to get them to take your desired action that you want them to take. And you got to stop treating them all the same. Right. And then I guess lastly, right, it's kind of one last one is you have to monitor your bounce rates and complaints, right? So you have to be mindful of the analytics for some of these quote unquote negative things that are happening, these negative engagements, things like hard bounces and spam complaints. Those are huge red flags. So you wanna have a process that kind of automates in the removal essentially of these email addresses right when they happen. So that way you can keep your sender reputation intact. Again, just like your personal reputation or your personal brand, or, you know, how someone knows you as a person, how that's so important. So too is kind of your sender reputation. That's your digital reputation that's gonna allow you to enter the inbox or be denied. Right. And then last thing I'd say too is like your ESP should be handling this for you, but just make sure that you're keeping an eye on this. And then also too, having tools like Google Postmaster, Yahoo Sender Hub, et cetera, and really making sure that you're monitoring those as well. So you get the full picture is going to be great because your ESP is not getting that data from Google. And it is your responsibility to make sure that you're aware of what's happening, especially with how important Google is. And I guess Yahoo, Yahoo as well.

What's up guys.

Real quick.

I need just 30 seconds of your time. You already know that personalization is the holy grail of retention marketing. It's that unicorn that we're all chasing, no pun intended. But let's face it, time, resource, and nonstop content changes can make it incredibly difficult for any retention marketer to create real personalization. Well, not until today, that is. I'm really excited to share that Nacelle's new AI-powered product recommendation solution is here. And this AI-powered suite goes way beyond basic customers also bought recommendations. It actually analyzes the entire customer journey. Yes, that's right. That's right, from first click to checkout, so you can deliver hyper-relevant experiences to each of your customers. Okay, let me make this super, super simple for you so we're on the same page. So basically, their AI is going to analyze each customer's complete product journey. It's going to create a product collection to automatically push into your email marketing campaigns, which is going to generate a dynamic landing page with those exact personalizations and those exact recommendations. This is going to create a true unified personalized experience at scale. And merchants can transform their e-com store with AI-powered product recommendations that understand their customers' actual behaviors, not just their purchases. So if you're an e-com brand hungry for next-level personalization, you know, the ones that you always hear people talk about, but they don't actually give you a tool to use, now you have one. You have to check out Nacelle's new AI-powered product recommendation today and let them know that Jimmy and I sent you.

Now back to the pod.

Yeah, you know, The spam complaint thing that you talked about, I think that's something— bounce and spam complaints are things that people haven't been super hyper-aware of. But I know that with a lot of the changes that have happened in this market, people are talking more and more about them. And it's good, man. I think people should be recognizing those as metrics. And they're not always the tail because if you have an email going to spam sometimes, like meaning like your email's not going very well, you're not going to get very many complaints or spam complaints because no one's actually receiving your email. So There is a fine line of looking at those metrics. They're not binary. You've got to look at the entire story to make them. But, you know, tools like Grid Email Validation are going to really help that. So I do get that and I agree with you on that. All right. Well, let's talk SMS because I think this is something really interesting. You know, I make a joke about this often on social media because I say, you know, we learned so much over the last 10, 20 years in email marketing and then SMS came out. What? I mean, look, it's been out for a while, but really took off in my maybe 2019, 2020 really. But the reality is like, people don't do anything with their SMS because there aren't the typical spam filters, there aren't things that people do. So let me talk about some of the things that you should be thinking about cleaning that list. All right, so first things first, and I know that this is a thing now, the rule in the world right now about opt-ins with SMS is they don't have to be confirmed, right? However, I believe especially in e-commerce, a confirmed opt-in is really just a good best practice that is occurring in this market, and you should be doing just like email. You want to make sure that people actually want to receive these texts because, well, in text messaging there are laws like TCPA and different things, and complaints could become fines and headaches for you at some level. And the last thing I want people to do is have those. So using a confirmed opt-in, again, very standard, most people are used to it. Confirm Y to yes, or text me to confirm in. There's like 2 different ways, like the yes method or the way that you text in to subscribe to people. I definitely think about that. I also think about the invalid numbers, right? And again, your SMS providers should be doing this, but, you know, people put in their landline numbers and I'm surprised people have landlines, but people put in their landline numbers sometimes and you got to be able to dictate and detect those things and make sure you're getting rid of those things or getting rid of bad numbers. So kind of the unengagement that leads to usually the segment by engagement. And I think This is where most people are failing with SMS, man. Like SMS is expensive, right? There's a channel that comes into place, but the reality is you want to check who's clicking the links and replying. And if someone's not engaging, you should try to send them the same thing, a sunset flow, a re-engagement flow, or removing them from your bulk SMS. You still want to keep them subscribed. You don't need to get rid of them, I think, because there isn't really much of a cost to keep people's phone numbers around, but you don't want to keep sending them, especially in those bulk SMS that cost a lot of money. Chase, I know you also are into SMS more and more, but what do you think about SMS? What tips do you have when you're— we're talking about this?

Yeah, the first one for me would be to watch the data. So kind of like we talked about before with email, with this, we wanna focus on opt-outs. So monitoring and taking a close look at your opt-outs, right? And if you notice, for example, that you have a segment of your list that's opting out at a higher rate, it might mean your content isn't relevant, or maybe they signed up for offers and you're just not sending them offers, right? Or maybe you're sending too frequently, right? You know, there's really kind of this fine line with SMS, with sending frequently enough and not oversending because it can be kind of annoying and obtrusive. So you do wanna kind of clean out those uninterested numbers and just be mindful of frequency, content relevancy, et cetera. And then the next one would be, again, we, you talked about a little bit, SMS is expensive. Email comparatively is really cheap.

SMS is, Expensive.

It's kind of on the other side where it costs a lot more. So with this, if you're not mindful of who you're sending to and why you're sending and kind of having a good reason to back it up or make a case for it, your costs can add up really quickly. And if you're just kind of batching and blasting and no real plan, you're gonna spend a lot of money with probably very little return. And, and with that too, like if you're paying per text message sent, every invalid or unengaged contact that you send to, like is going to go to your budget. Like your budget is gonna rack up a bill. So you really do wanna keep No, that's great.

And, you know, and as I mentioned, my hot take around how brand— I don't see brands using SMS correctly. I think what's interesting is even if we go SMS or email, the commonality is really segmentation at the end of the day, segmentation strategy. So, hey, it's Jimmy, and I know you're enjoying the pod, but if I could just have 30 seconds of your time, I wanna tell you about our friends at Omnisend. Omnisend is an all-in-one SMS marketing automation platform built specifically for brands. For e-commerce brands. They make it super easy to engage with their customers, drive repeat sales, and create those seamless personalized experiences we're always talking about. One thing I love about Omnisend is they're trusted by over 125,000 e-commerce merchants worldwide, and their users absolutely love them. With a 4.8-star rating with over 5,800 reviews on the Shopify App Store, it's an obvious choice for your email, SMS, and push notification needs. In fact, Chase and I are in the process of moving Chase's newsletter, and their support team has been fantastic. Their platform is filled with tons of features, and it's incredibly easy to use. Their migration process has even been easier. They have this entire team to help you, and they have this great automated tool that brings your contacts right over from your favorite platform that you might be using today. Also, they aren't raising your prices constantly and calling them profile-based pricing alignment, so I really enjoy that about them too. If you're looking to take your email marketing to the next level, I highly recommend you check out Omnisend. They've got the tools, the automation, the expertise to help your brands grow and thrive. So head on over to omnisend.com/sendit to learn more about scaling your customers' engagement today and let them know Jimmy and Chase sent you. Now back to the pod. Let's focus on segmentation strategy around engaged and unengaged people. We're talking about for data hygiene.

Yeah.

We've mentioned it a few times and I feel like there's more that we can talk about. Chase, you wanna start off and talk about like how you think about the segmentation you should be really diving into as we think about data hygiene?

For sure. So I've got 3 for you. Okay. The first that I want you guys to kind of think about and look at, right, is going to be, you know, engage segments. And, and, and really with this, right, like I'm gonna share, I guess, 3 segments kind of at the core. And these need to be split up into, I guess, 2 buckets, right? Customers and prospects at a minimum. So starting with that first one I mentioned is engaged segment. I mean, here we wanna be mindful of kind of last open, last click, or last purchase within the last 1 to 2 months. So someone has opened or clicked or made a purchase, or, you know, have done all of those things combined in the last 30 to 60 days. That's number one. So these are gonna be kind of quote unquote your VIPs, where we're gonna wanna treat them special and like gold, and we're gonna wanna send them slightly more frequent content and more exclusive kind of content, more behind the scenes, more kind of closer look type content. So that's number one. Number 2 is we wanna look at kind of our unengaged segment. So in this case, right, if our engaged segment's 30 to 60 days, our unengaged segment's gonna be people that have not opened or clicked in the last, let's call it 60 to 90 days. And with this, right, I think a great opportunity here is sending a re-engagement campaign. You know, we miss you. Are you still interested? That type of thing. And if it elicits some kind of response, right, some kind of click, some kind of reply, great. They're quote unquote now able to be actively engaged. If however, they aren't able to engage, right, there's no click, there's no response, there's no action taken. You should consider removing them, right? Because if you can't get them to engage within that first 3 months, right, that 60 to 90 day window, the likelihood that they're going to engage in the future is a lot lower. And I guess the last one I'd say is kind of these custom segments. So for example, some brands I've noticed track high spend customers versus low spend customers, or they maybe do it on order frequency. So when you can kind of customize your approach for each of these different types of groups, it's just gonna be way more fruitful for you and it's just gonna ultimately be a better experience for your subscribers, your customers type of thing. So with these, these segments should kind of trigger different types of flows as well. So you're not just manually picking who gets what email. And Jimmy, do you mind kind of talking a little bit about that?

Yeah, no, I think that, you know, one thing that people don't think enough about is like, you know, filtering different things and actions that are happening. If people aren't engaging with your email, you should be looking at their channel preference. Maybe they're on email or SMS, but it's also, you know, it's really funny, but in this world, people will browse your site, they'll do a bunch of stuff, but they just won't check their email either, right? So those people just need to be handled a little bit differently when it comes down to it. But I love the idea of thinking about just very binary, like people who are engaged, people who aren't. You start separating them out and getting a little bit deeper. That doesn't mean you shouldn't email them. I think that you should definitely be emailing wider segments. It's just really understanding where are they in your cycle? How engaged are they? Because that's really the only cycle and sign that you have ultimately, and you've got to lean into that as best as you can. All right. Well, let me jump into the next part because I think what's interesting is There's also this thing that's happening in this market, and it's an issue that's happening more than ever. And I'm talking about bots, spam traps, and bad addresses, because we're seeing these come all over the place. We're seeing them destroy deliverability and reputation really quick, and sometimes they're malicious in manner. So we're talking about like fake addresses, uh, you know, which are really interesting because people are either planting fake addresses or even worse, they're just typing stuff in wrong, right? There are also these things that are in the internet like going around and scrubbing like bad bot, what they call bots, which are like injections, right? They're going to go from website to website and inject a bunch of opt-ins. And then there's also spam traps, which are like aged bad emails. So there's a lot of that going on and that's part of the data hygiene thing. So when I think about that, there's 4 different things I think about. One, I think about form protections, right? More people are doing things. I think the most basic thing that you should be doing on your web forms and Most ESPs and form providers have that, but using CAPTCHAs, right? Where they need to create either a backend CAPTCHA to make sure that they're not seeing a cycle or even those annoying typing things, something to really prevent people to avoid automated entries, especially in a world of AI and all the things that are happening right now. I think a lot of that's going to be easier— harder— easier and easier, and it's going to be harder to catch. So you've got to get in front of that. You mentioned this before, email verification is becoming more important. You know, suspicious addresses, bad ones, uh, you know, ones that are potentially malicious, right? Running them through a verification tool and kind of cleaning up the ones that are not good, right? Also, dude, and we've been talking about this a lot, the behavioral flags. We're talking about when you see erratic opens and click patterns happening, man. You know how many times you see— and we've— we were just talking about this— you send an email out, it opens, it clicks immediately, and you're like, wait, how is that even possible when There's no way a person is engaged. I mean, they're not sitting here waiting for Chase Diamond's email to hit their inbox, right? You got to look at those. And there's no real good way to look at them, unfortunately, except looking at them in a more manual process where you're kind of like downloading that initial click activity and like staring at it and trying to understand what's the pattern. Is there a certain Gmail or Yahoo or AOL, the top-level domain, or is it a Microsoft, is it custom? There's usually something that's showing up there, and oftentimes it's something to do with a lot of the new mail platforms that are kind of making sure that they do. And this is some of the hard things, right? And, and I think the last takeaway that I'll say as you think about it is, man, when you think an email is fishy, spammy, something looks really weird, dude, suppress it. I think this is something people are afraid of. They don't want to lose the hard-worked email that they've gotten, but reality is that These things are pretty easy to see when they look spammy and they don't look real. The reality is they're probably not real, so you should get rid of them if you ever feel that way.

Dude, I love it. That's great. Totally agree with you. And like you said, being proactive is going to be cheaper and way more effective than dealing with kind of a massive bounce or complaint rate later. So just knock it out when you notice it and hopefully you do notice it, right? You should be noticing it. Cool. All right, well let's connect the dots kind of with all of this. So essentially, right, like what we've been talking about today is a clean list, you know, clean SMS list, a clean email list, you know, both of them doesn't really matter, right? That translates into actual cost savings for e-commerce brands. And frankly, if you're not an e-commerce brand listening to this, it's gonna save you money as well. So here's kind of what I think about. So lower kind of ESP SMS platform costs. So again, if you're being charged for kind of a per sub or per text or email basis, pruning out unengaged contacts can cut your bill down significantly. Number one. And with that too, right? The other benefit is better deliverability. So higher engagement, increased conversion rates, you know, you're gonna be happy. Things are gonna look and perform much better. So when your opens and clicks both go up, you are gonna make more money per send and you're gonna spend less money, right? You're spending less on your tools. And making more money in ROI. Jimmy, those are kind of the ones for me. What comes to mind for you?

Dude, I got, I got a good one here. You know, if you have bad deliverability or you're not taking care of your hygiene, the thing that you don't think about, the invisible thing you think about is the reduced customer acquisition costs. And what I'm talking about is very simple. Persons come to your site, they're opting in and for that coupon, and the email's not landing in their inbox because you haven't done the good job doing hygiene because you have a poor reputation. And the reality is the better that reputation, the faster and upfront, even getting into that primary tab versus that secondary or what is it, the promotional or updates or social tabs. These are really, really important because the better engaged your list is, the more likely someone like Google, for example, is going to place you in those tabs, right? That's the way that these things work. And ultimately, higher conversions in the same list means you don't have to spend as much acquiring brand new leads. You don't have to keep working on the top of the funnel if your middle of your funnel is taking care of itself really well. And it's usually a direct impact to your bottom line. Plus, man, a healthy sender reputation lowers all risk, right? From landing pages to spam to emails and all that stuff. So look, Chase, this isn't the most fun, like sexiest topic in the world, but the reality is it's really important. List hygiene is an important one. And, you know, especially with the recent price increases from some of the ESPs out there, these are things that people have to think about. But let's recap today's talk here today because I know we went through a lot of stuff, but It really comes down to 4 simple things, I think, ultimately. So here's what I think about. First one I think about is scheduling regular maintenance. I think the thing that you should be taking away from this pod is saying, okay, I hear you, this is important, but how often should I be doing this? In my opinion, you should be doing it monthly or at the worst time quarterly. You should be auditing, you should be removing, you should be getting rid of invalid contacts, you should be using verification tools to go clean this stuff out, right? Number 2, Segment, segment, segment, man. And, you know, making sure that you're using segmentation is becoming more and more important than ever. But you should also be thinking about it in a different way, not just segment to 90-day engage, but start realizing when people are no longer engaging when they were engaging, it's time to deploy a re-engagement or sunset flow to try to get them back. And then maybe you understand why that message wasn't going to them. Too often, as we talk about, Chase, Is like people bucket everyone into 90 days and then at 91 days you get rid of them. But the reality is maybe at 60 days you can start getting more aggressive about your offer or you can start changing your message to them. Maybe they're a prospect and we know a prospect after 30, 40 days, usually they're starting to be quite unengaged because something's not hitting. Maybe the discount wasn't good enough. Maybe, you know, the offering, the products, the email, whatever it might be, but starting to really dig deeper into your segmentation. Again, watch that pod about segmentation for everybody. That's definitely it.

Chase, what else you got here?

I think there's a couple more that I'm sure there are I'm missing here.

Yeah, 2 final ones before we close this out. Again, double opt-in plus verification. So the goal here being prevent issues before they even ever have a chance to bite you in the butt, right? So do that upfront, just have clean data, make your life way, way easier on the front end. Because once you get to the back end and you have these issues, good luck to you, right?

Yeah. I'm with you.

And then the last one would be monitor costs and metrics, right? So when you're monitoring and cleaning these up and making sure that your lists are healthy, you're gonna be happy, right? So you're gonna have direct savings, revenue boost from these clean lists. And, you know, if you're an agency, if you could go save your clients money by doing these types of things, by A, saving them money on their ESP fees or their SMS provider fees, And then you can also make them more money. Like they're gonna hold onto you forever, right? Like that's such a great thing that you could do for your clients. And if you're a brand listening to this, go do it for yourself.

I like that. Say pay less, make more. I mean, that's really the lesson there on that side. And that is really the core of data hygiene. It's not just about great deliverability, but it's like, hey, this stuff is gonna help you prune your sending. So you're gonna send less emails ultimately. But it's not that you're sending less emails. You're just sending less emails to the people that don't really want or are no longer interested in your emails. What you are doing is still sending emails to the right people. And because you're doing a good job and your engagement is high, your reputation is high. And ultimately that reputation is going to help you drive into the inbox more and more, which means more eyes are going to get in front of it. And that is what you want to do. All right, Chase, that's a wrap, dude. Episode 22. This was an interesting one around data hygiene. We hope the listeners really enjoyed it. It was a little bit different, but I think it's a good enough topic that people need to hear about it. And I don't feel like anyone talks about it because it's not sexy enough. So we're going to talk about it. And it's all about maintaining a clean, high-converting list for your email and SMS. All right, guys, if you listened to this pod and you enjoyed it, please make sure you like, subscribe, and follow and leave us a rating on your favorite podcast listening platform. You can follow the show on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, IG, and of course, even TikTok. And there's a few ways to connect with us. First and foremost, We encourage you to join our newsletter, Ecom Email Marketer. We drop newsletters only about retention marketing each and every week. I think we're dropping now 4 times a week. So it sounds like a lot, but dude, we're breaking down cool stuff. We just had a brand this past week email us back and was like, hey, I work on this brand. So cool for you to like tell us what we should be working on, right? We did that on accident, but we weren't really intentionally going after them. We just thought that was a really good brand to break down and saw Lots of ways to improve it. Secondly, if you enjoy it, we actually have a community and a certification program out there. We're gonna link those on below. First things, if you want to learn more about the things that we're talking about and really wanna get certified, we have a course. It's 25 hours of training, end-to-end email, SMS, AI deliverability, and so much more. And we'll get you a certification. We've got a coupon code available on the site where you can get some bucks off right now. Alternatively, if you wanna engage with us Chase and myself, or you want to go join a community of over 250 retention marketers where we're just talking about this stuff every day and you've got questions you want to ask or you want to engage with some smart people from the biggest brands in the world are inside of this little community we have on Slack, come find us. It's a link is going to be in the description or wherever around this thing. So you should be able to find that. And last but not least, if you want to follow us personally, you can find us all over social. Chase, where can they find you?

I'm on most platforms. Chase Diamond, no A in Diamond.

Perfect. And you can find me on LinkedIn and X. That's where the 2 places I go and post about retention every day. All right. Next week, Chase, we're coming back here with first-party data and email and SMS. We're talking about engaging subscribers with polls, quizzes, and much more. I'm excited about this one because I think this is something that's, again, underutilized. People collect them. They have no idea what to do with them. Let's tell them what to do.

Sounds great, man. Let's do it.

All right. Well, we'll see you next week, dude.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.