Successful marketing takes more than telling a great story. It also takes delivering those stories when, where and how your target audiences are most likely to engage with them. And, of all the channels and tactics available to brands today, email marketing is still one of the best ways to reach people. In fact, email generates $42 for every $1 spent for an incredible 4,200% return on investment (ROI).

But as your own inbox likely illustrates, there are plenty of examples of bad email marketing — guilty of weak creative, off-target messaging, poorly timed delivery or a combo of these.

Inadequate email list maintenance is often at least part of the problem. Many companies take a set-and-forget approach to email lists if they aren’t actively growing them. Cleaning up (read: removing contacts) your email lists may feel like a last-ditch effort. But focusing on the size of your list weakens more important metrics around engagement: opens and clicks.

Want to optimize your email marketing and reap the benefits? Start with these four simple tips.

1. Reel them back in.

Start by reviewing a list of email campaigns that garnered low engagement. Check things such as open rate, hard and soft bounce rates, campaign performance, click-through rates (CTR) spam-complaint rates, unsubscribe rates, mobile open rate and email client share.

With some high-level analysis, you may discover commonalities that explain why these emails weren’t opened. With a little creativity and knowledge of your target audience, you can personalize the email content — starting with the subject line — to recapture their attention.

2. Offer a way out.

Help your subscribers be proactive about keeping your emails or, if the content is no longer relevant, removing themselves from the list.

To keep its email list fresh, Palmetto Bluff, a planned community, resort and nature preserve in the South Carolina Lowcountry, regularly invites unengaged subscribers to manage their preferences. This creates a chance to recapture their attention and allows them to leave on their own if the content is no longer relevant.

3. Automate cleanup.

Many email marketing platforms, such as HubSpot and Mailchimp, include a feature that allows users to automatically clean up their email lists. These services provide the ability to set a rule that identifies and removes inactive (unengaged) emails from lists with the click of a button. Our HubSpot partnership allows us to do this for our own email marketing campaigns: