Posted by Among all the tools available for digital promotion, email marketing is meant to offer the best ROI. However, to enjoy good returns from your email marketing campaigns, you need to execute them the right way.
We all know, mailing lists management forms the core of any email marketing campaign. If your list management is poor, you can’t get any success in convincing people through the email campaign.
Here, we’ll dive into details about why email list management is so important, and what makes a good list. Besides that, we’ll discuss the current top-notch management practices by implementing which you can get appreciable digital marketing success.
What adds to the Email List’s Health?
Before heading towards the discussion of the best email list management practices, We should discuss the characteristics that add to the efficiency and effectiveness of a mailing list. Email marketing experts have recognized several factors and qualities of a healthy email list.
- A healthy list ensures a good deliverability rate, and a mailing list recording 95% or above deliverability rate is highly acceptable.
- Its frequency of new subscribers is high. Also, the majority of those subscribers actively become part of your email list.
- The email list should put forth a low bounce rate. Experts say it should be below 5% and in a single-digit.
- Lastly, a mailing list should also have a great open rate. Any list boasting a 15%-25% open rate is considered a healthy one. It has the potential to roll your campaign at an amazing ROI.
To make an email list healthy and make it fulfill the needs mentioned above, you should be proactive with its management.
The forthcoming discussion will be centered around the practices and measures that help you to keep your list healthy and smoothly run promotional campaigns and perfectly handle the sales funnel.
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1) Look after your Email List Hygiene
An unhealthy email list is the opposite of a healthy list. An ailing and unhealthy mailing list registers abysmal opening rates and poor deliverability. In the majority of cases, an email list goes unhealthy because it’s crammed with inactive and invalid contacts.
To heal such an unhealthy mailing list, you have to work on its hygiene. You have to scan it for all the inactive/invalid addresses and remove all of them.
Several businesses and their marketers know the importance of email list hygiene. They recognize it as an annual or bi-annual activity, but that’s wrong. We should realize that it takes no time for the email list data to decay, and that makes it necessary to regularly clean the email list.
A B2B data company’s research exclaims that 4.5% of addresses in your list can decay within a time frame of just four weeks. If we stretch this decaying trend to six months (26 weeks) or a year (52 weeks), you may find yourself standing with a list with more inactive/invalid addresses than the active ones.
Just imagine what will happen to your campaign?
To avoid such a decayed list, you need to scan your email list every month without forgetting. This rapid cleaning and revamping of the list will ensure that it keeps on registering good open rates and deliverability.
Enterprises not using any software while carrying out email marketing can hire list cleaning services such as My Email verifier to maintain the hygiene of their email lists.
On the other hand, if you’re using any robust email automation platform can use features like “unsubscribe inactive subscribers” or “reconfirm your audience” (names of features may change, but major robust email automation platform do provide such ones). That way, you can get rid of “unhealthy” contacts.
2) Monitor email frequency
So, why do people unsubscribe from your email marketing lists?
The most common reason is the number of emails sent to them. Many companies send identical emails far too frequently, and that frustrates subscribers. It compels them to opt out.
Upon sending the welcome email, you should give your subscribers the flexibility to manage their email preferences as well as customize the type of content they feel happy to receive from you and also, how often in a given time frame.
This puts your contacts in control, creating a degree of understanding between the sender and receiver instead of disregarding your contacts’ preferences and overwhelming them with annoying messages hourly!
Maintain your subscriber list, and it will certainly help your company follow CAN-SPAM compliance. You won’t lose your contacts altogether when content or volume becomes an issue.
In case your company has infused money in a marketing automation platform or reputable email service provider (ESP), it comes with integrated subscription management functionality which will work as long as you keep it on “enable” mode.
3) In-Depth Segmentation of Your Email Lists is compulsory
Market segmentation is necessary no matter what sort of promotion campaign you carry out, and email marketing is no exception. Besides that, you need to segment your list to reach out to the right audience with the right message effectively.
Segmentation needs have thriven up in the last 2 years. Amid the thriving competition in all markets, the general psychographic and demographic segmentation no longer prove to be sufficient.
Cutthroat competition and changing marketing needs have given way to deeper segmentation of email lists. Today, multilayer and deep segmentation are considered a compulsory element of email list management. So, let’s understand how to carry out deep segmentation of your email lists.
Core Segmentation
Firstly, you need to segment your list for a few most apparent attributes. For example, divide your list based on age group, lead score, past activity on your website, location, etc. If you are rolling on with a B2B mailing list, you’ll also have to factor in the enterprise’s size. You can set a mailing activity properly for these segments by using a market automation platform.
However, in case you are boasting a huge enterprise with a mailing list consisting of thousands of entries, personalizing your email campaign will be challenging despite this segmentation.
For example, if your business primarily serves the West Coast, you may have thousands of subscribers from the East Coast. In such a case, location-based segmenting won’t assist you in sending out personalized emails. You can face the same issue with other broad segments while your email list is sporting thousands of addresses.
Contact Tagging: A way of adding a Further Layer to Your Segmentation
For every single of your segmentation cases similar to the one mentioned above, contact tagging surely is an effective approach to slice the email list for greater personalized outreach.
For example, if the further branch is what you wanna achieve from your NYC subscribers into small segments, tagging them for certain attributes, qualities, or occasions. However, you must be having an email marketing & automation tool at your disposal for carrying out the contact tagging process.
These software applications will permit you to import your CRM tags to the email list you have. You can, besides that, make custom tags in line with the value set of your recipients and your business’s nature.
For example, an e-commerce store is what you own. You can further customize a contact tag for every single of those subscribers who have already spent nearly $200 on your store. Just like that, you can also tag your premium clients with a certain tag to offer them special treatment.
Why Contact Tagging or In-Depth Segmentation?
With contact tagging or deep segmenting, you can ensure your email list in a highly personalized way. You can identify and target your audience’s focal point and present the ideal incentives for pushing them further in your sales funnel.
For contact tagging, don’t forget to use the effective data you have on your subscribers as much as possible, the more in-depth & effective segmentation you can do and outcomes will be surely heartwarming.
4) Gather email addresses with consent
Among the major aspects why email lists are highly valuable is that they are basically populated by the subscribers who have created a conscious selection to be there.
Opt-in marketing that’s permission-based is not only less intrusive & more ethical for subscribers, but it implies that your list is complete of interested potential recipients who are having high chances to engage with you. Besides that, there will be no issues with GDPR, the EU regulation, which needs consent for all of that personal data.
Never stop looking at your email list development with quality subscribers. This is typically done with sign-up forms as well as pop-ups on your site. However, other tactics incorporating contests and referral marketing are famous too.
Try asking your recipients for mobile numbers as well & an email address if possible as SMS marketing surely is becoming an increasingly used aspect of eCommerce business’ marketing strategy for omnichannel.
In fact, Black Friday & Cyber Monday combined forwarded more SMS messages in comparison to the whole month of November 2019.
Just as it seems, you should never, ever, purchase an email list and try blasting out unsolicited emails to recipients that are random is not only an ineffective as well as unethical (and sometimes illegal) method but with most of them sure are gonna into the spam folder and end up rapidly destroying your sender reputation.
Never flush your valuable money and reputation down the toilet, instead, try putting in the time to develop and nurture your list.
5) Scan your list on the basis of engagement
The days when any subscriber depending on an email seemed like an active address for years are gone. Presently, the definition of engagement surely has changed a lot. Any address that has been inactive even for a short time period or a few campaigns is not deemed ideal for the list.
6) Take Care of Irregular Contacts and Disengaged
Addresses that have poor engagement are gonna put a dent in your open & click-through rate. These two characteristics just will not downgrade the value of your list, but they also impact your reputation as an email marketer or brand’s manager.
You must pay attention to your subscribers’ engagement for avoiding this outcome.
You can also set up a workflow in your email marketing automation platform for scanning and identifying addresses, which haven’t opened your email in, for example, nearly 2 months. Just like that, you can find the subscribers who no longer have interest in your recent campaigns.
After that, make a separate list including all those contacts and eliminate them from the active email list you are gonna implement. By doing this, you will also ensure that the least number of your emails will end up in the spam folder.
Most importantly, you must devise a re-engagement campaign for every single of those contacts that you have separated.
7) Make a list of your most rewarding subscribers
While it’s essential to eliminate contacts that haven’t engaged for months or years or are irregular with their engagement, then it’s also essential to offer importance to your subscribers that are the most active on the list.
Again a fantastic email marketing tool surely will come in handy. You can, after that, configure its workflow to gather knowledge about the addresses that respond to every single of your messages & campaigns.
Make a super subscriber list including every single of those contacts as you can use that email listing to unlock the opportunity to drive the highest engagement.
Also, using such a list as your major group can be helpful. Thus, before you launch a service or product on a huge scale, you can surely share the idea with them by asking their opinion, and just like that, testing any rebranding experiment can be beneficial with the super subscriber list.
The response from the most rewarding subscriber list for any fresh offer or significant business shift will permit you in gauging the response of the leftover market.
8) Begin from the right foot
First impressions always count, so you must make your fresh subscribers feel welcome with a warm, rewarding, and memorable experience.
According to Ominsend research, the series of welcoming emails are the ideal performing automation accessible, showing consistently greater open rates and the heaviest conversion rates of all emails that you’ll be sending.
Using the info you’ve gathered from your segmentation efforts & contact tags, you can surely create a personalized and effective welcome series, which surely makes your new recipients feel valued while they set their preferences, telling the story of your brand, and perhaps providing them with an introductory offer to nudge them towards the very first purchase.
This is the moment for your brand to capture your fresh subscriber’s entire attention, so try using the effectiveness of your welcome series to really impact with an impression, and turn them into loyal recipients for numerous years!
9) Release a re-engagement campaign
The first step that requires to be finished before releasing a re-engagement campaign is to get knowledge and eliminate all unengaged subscribers. It wouldn’t advantage the organization to still incorporate those contacts, as forwarding emails to unengaged subscribers negatively impacts the sender’s reputation.
Unengaged subscribers might still be having an effective email address, however, haven’t opened and/or tapped one of the emails you sent within the recent 6 to 12 months.
They might have unsubscribed mentally from your company without actually taking any action or hitting the opt-out button, which you bury on your email’s bottom. When subscribers start ignoring or deleting your organization’s emails, it surely gonna impact your open rate, which will result in a low sending score.
Once you’ve gathered knowledge about the contacts who are non-engaging, it’s time to begin planning the re-engagement campaign. Forward a targeted message that will be acknowledging that they haven’t been interacting with your emails for a long time.
After that, ask them if they still have an interest in your email lists or brand. This assists you in re-engaging your unengaged subscribers, and try to purge your lists of those who don’t actually interact with your re-engagement campaign.
10) Try making people easily unsubscribe
At first, look, making people unsubscribe daily seems like this heading contains a typo. But, that’s not the actual case. The email list management that’s contemporary advocates for simple unsubscribing.
It’s been a long-established method that marketers bury the option of unsubscribing in the email’s fine print to ensure individuals can’t unsubscribe.
However, years of experience have changed the email marketers’ way of realizing that there is no point in trying deliberate things to stop people from unsubscribing from the list.
An individual who wants to unsubscribe from your list means that they are no longer interested in your messages & campaigns anyway. Rather Than that, the longer those individuals will stay on your list, the more they can turn counterproductive.
For example, a frustrated individual failing to unsubscribe from your email list might mark your (the sender’s) address as spam. Such upset individuals, whom you have been keeping subscribers against their will, might also go for a bad-mouth review about your business among their friends & family.
The increasing number of frustrated contacts wanting to unsubscribe might also land you in a lot of trouble considering the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
Therefore, remember to put a prominent unsubscribe button on your emails properly. This way, your list will be kept spruced up automatically and secure it from any potential reputation or liability harm.
Some Additional Good Practices
Before wrapping up the article, discussing some additional methods is crucial that will complement your email list handling.
Keep your Emails highly personalized
While segmentation, as well as contact tagging, will assist you in identifying little niches for a good personalization, you must write your email in a specific tone that sounds just like a one-on-one correspondence instead of a bulk email.
Try to converse in “we and you” rather than “the company & customers” and ensure you directly address the potential major points of the market you are going to target. Keep your email body content short, to keep your subscribers away from boredom.
Besides that, there is no damage in using fantastic informal language & vernacular to keep your mail an enjoyment to read in case you are a B2E enterprise.
Allow your subscribers to determine the frequency
Rather than continuously tweaking the email marketing workflow of your tools and getting into the guessing game, permit your recipients to determine what number of emails they would prefer receiving in a certain time window.
This feature will surely assist you in curating your email list for the ideal operations of engagement & sales funnel.
Try to harness an organic Email List with the Consent of Subscribers
All those email list management techniques won’t work if you try using them on lists, which you bought by any third parties. First, purchasing mailing lists can also land you in heavy trouble with the CAN-SPAM Act.
Besides that, recipients in those lists might haven’t actively subscribed to the email list you offer. Because of that, the overwhelming majority of them are surely gonna ignore, bounce off, or might also end up marking your address spam upon receiving your emails that are unsolicited.
We hope the email marketing discussion we went through surely will assist you with email list handling in line with the needs of modern times. In case you have grasped those practices perfectly, robust email marketing & automation will surely be what you will be implementing soon.
Most importantly, email marketing is the most crucial part of business and if you haven’t upgraded your regimen of email marketing with a reliable software application, then it’s the ideal timing of doing it!
The basics of email list management: The conclusion
So, you certainly can’t escape list management if you really want to add success to your email marketing campaign. Rolling on with an unfiltered email list seems to be an axe on your own legs.
How much does a dependable email verification service cost?
Let’s talk about the best service here – My Email Verifier. Besides providing a lot of free credits, you have to pay $1.44 for 500 credits. Further, a hundred thousand credits cost you just $120, and that won’t hurt you, we know that!