In episode 99 of the Email Sound Booth Podcast, Liz Wilcox discusses the vital practice of scrubbing your email list. She explains the shift from scrubbing being a best practice to now being a legal requirement imposed by major email providers like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Liz emphasizes that sending emails to inactive users can lead to severe consequences such as being blocked entirely. She provides insights into how scrubbing your list can improve your metrics and stresses the importance of continuous email list growth. Liz also mentions upcoming events like List Building Live and offers further support through her email marketing membership and The Email Sound Booth Facebook group.
Liz’s Kit [Convertkit] Affiliate Link
Transcript
Hey, Liz Wilcox here. You’re listening to the email sound booth podcast. This is episode 99 and I kind of got my serious tone on and I promise to be quick, but there has been so much discussion over in our email sound booths, uh, Facebook group over in my live Q and A’s for email marketing membership and even people asking, uh, in the inbox about.
Scrubbing your list. Um, I did another episode. I’ll link in the show notes Um about scrubbing your list and what i’m doing for 2025, but I just want to make something super clear. A lot of people might be afraid to scrub their email list. Um, Oh, well, you know, maybe this person will come back. Maybe they’ll read it another time.
I worked so hard to build my email list. And you’re right, I’m doing, you know, March 11th through the 13th. We’ve got list building live. I want to help you build your list because I know it is difficult. So stay tuned for that. But what I want you to know about scrubbing your list is it’s always been a best practice, right?
You know, email marketers like myself, Oh, you got to scrub your list. You got to keep it clean for deliverability sake. You don’t want to pay for, uh, you know, an email address that. Isn’t opening your emails, right? It used to be a best practice. But now, how can I put this? But now it’s the law. Right? Big, giant, I call them internet gods, but the big email providers Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Et cetera, et cetera, right?
Those entities, those internet gods are now making it this law, right? They do not want you sending emails to people that are not opening. Right. And part of this is they don’t want to run servers for emails that are no longer in use. And so they are, I don’t know if I want to use the word punish, but they’re dinging.
People that are sending to people that aren’t opening. They only want you to send emails to people that are actively engaged. Right? And this is a good thing for consumers. This means the people, like if some spammer keeps emailing me, And I’m indicating no interest because I’m not even moving it from junk to the inbox, let alone opening it.
The internet gods are going to pay attention to that and they’re going to block the spammer. You are not a spammer, but they are practicing those same things. If you send an email to me over and over and over in hopes that, well, I know Liz used to open them and maybe, you know, maybe she’ll open them again.
Maybe she has them in a folder and she’s going to open them again in 45 days. The internet gods don’t care about your timeline and your maybes. This is now law, okay? They don’t want to see emails sent out to people that aren’t opening. And so scrubbing your list, and again I’m going to link to that other episode on what I’m doing in 2025, has become very, very important.
So important. That if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see my face. I’m not smiling. You can hear that I’m not smiling. You can hear that this is serious and I’m not doing this to scare you or frighten you. And I definitely don’t want it to move you away from email marketing because guess what?
Social media, they do this all the time, but they never even announce it, right? They’re constantly changing the algorithm and you have to constantly chase it back, right? Email is still number one. And this is best, this is going to be the best thing for you because it’s going to allow you to see, I just did an episode, episode 97 on metrics.
This is going to allow you to see better metrics, right? To see who’s actually opened your emails. And it’s also going to, and I say it with love, light a fire up or up under your booty. To keep growing your freaking list, right? I just said i’m doing an entire list building live in march on how to grow your list.
I feel like A lot of people oh, I don’t want to scrub because my list is already small Well, guess what this used to be a best practice now It’s the law and now you better get to growing your email list, you know, we are nothing Without the growth of our email list And especially now that the internet gods, so to speak, are saying, Hey, stop it.
Stop sending to people that don’t open. If you continue to do so, we will start to put you in spam. We will start to block you, right? Altogether, which when you’re blocked, that means it doesn’t mean spam folder. That doesn’t mean junk or promotions. That means. I’m not even going to see your email. Okay? So, say it with love.
Hopefully this wasn’t too serious. Uh, but I just want you to understand that this is real. And I’m not just saying this as, Oh, put it on your to do list. You know, I’m not just trying to be like a bully or like your mom telling you what to do because that’s the way I want you to do things. Like, this is just the new norm, so to speak.
Alright, I do care about you so much. I want this so badly for you. Remember, this is okay. It is going, it is now the law. Like, scrub your email list and then focus on growing your email list so it doesn’t even matter. Okay. All right. Join email marketing membership. If you need more help with this, you want more in depth conversations about it, uh, happy to chat over in the Facebook group as well.
All those links are in the show notes. As always, I’m Liz Wilcox. You are awesome. And I’ll see you on the next episode, my friend, if I knew how to add, there we go.
