Email list management is one of the most important parts of any digital marketing strategy. It’s what makes sure that emails only go to people who want and actively engage with your content.
It also helps maintain deliverability by reducing bounces and unengaged subscribers that can affect your sending reputation. Follow these best practices to master your email list and get the most out of your efforts.
Segmentation
Email List Management is a process of managing your email list on an ongoing basis. It encompasses tagging, segmentation, and ensuring that all of your email addresses are valid and deliverable on a regular basis. This includes scrubbing non-existing addresses from your list, improving engagement and sending campaigns that are relevant to your audience.
This is a standard practice in email marketing, and one of the best ways to ensure that your subscribers will receive the content they want from you. By using tagging to label customers, you can send them content that is personalized for their needs and preferences.
Tagging can help you categorize recipients based on a variety of factors, including how they joined your email list (for example, social media referral) and their purchasing behavior. You can also use tagging to categorize your audience by demographics, such as gender, age, and location. This type of segmentation can help you create more targeted and engaging campaigns, as well as improve your ROI.
A more advanced form of email segmentation is behavioral, which allows you to divide your audience into groups based on their actions and interaction with your website. This is often done by looking at your email metrics, such as open and click-through rates, and sending re-engagement campaigns to those who aren’t interacting with your emails.
For example, you may have a large group of B2B clients that you send different content to, depending on their seniority in the company and their buying decisions. These are the types of insights you can gain by using email segmentation, which can be a huge advantage for your business.
It’s also important to consider the device that your subscribers use when conducting email segmentation. Some devices will only display certain parts of your emails, and you’ll want to make sure that your messages are optimized for those specific devices. This will ensure that your messages are as effective as possible and will help you generate more conversions from your email marketing efforts, making it moreso especially important to market to your list correctly.
Automation
Using a marketing automation software can help you streamline email list management. The software can perform a number of tasks for you, from sending email campaigns to your audience to automatically scrubbing non-existent or invalid email addresses in bulk. This can greatly reduce your overall costs because you’ll only be paying for emails that actually reach your recipients’ inboxes.
A clean email list helps ensure that your email campaigns get the results you’re looking for. This is because your messages will only reach engaged recipients, which can improve your open and click-through rates. Those higher engagement rates, in turn, can lead to more conversions and greater ROI.
As your business grows, it’s important to invest in the right email list management practices. This way, you can stay on top of your list and make sure that it’s always ready to send engaging, relevant content to your audience.
In order to grow your email list, you’ll want to use subscription forms and other lead generation methods like giveaways or opt-in pages. You’ll also need to follow best practices for collecting email addresses, including using a double opt-in process and making it easy to unsubscribe.
Once you’ve collected enough user email addresses, it’s time to start automating your list management process. This includes tagging and segmentation. Tagging allows you to divide your audience into groups based on common characteristics like demographics, psychographics, or geographic location. This can help you create more personalized emails that will connect with your subscribers on a personal level and increase your brand’s visibility.
Segmentation can be a bit more difficult to implement, but it’s essential for email success. This strategy focuses on grouping your audience into groups based on their interests and motivations, which will help you better understand them as individuals. You can also use this data to determine which types of content are most effective at driving your audience’s actions.
It’s important to make sure that your email list is clean and that you’re only sending to active, engaged subscribers. This will help you maintain a high deliverability rate and keep your emails out of the spam folder. In addition, it’s a good idea to have a system in place that will remove inactive users from your list after a certain amount of time to prevent them from continuing to receive your emails.
Personalization
Email personalization is a great way to deliver relevant content that can boost your ROI. Emails are a valuable marketing tool that can help you connect with your customers, and using personalization techniques such as tagging and segmentation can provide you with the data you need to create more effective messages.
The first step in creating a more personal email experience is to have clear objectives in mind. Identify what kind of information your subscribers value most, and then look at your historical data to see how they interact with the content you send out. Some popular examples of email personalization include using a subscriber’s name in the subject line, including location in an email message, or incorporating other data such as a customer’s role in your organization.
Keeping your email list healthy is an ongoing process, and it takes more than just using email verification tools to clean up invalid addresses. It’s important to regularly reevaluate your goals and determine what kinds of content will resonate with your audience. Taking a look at engagement metrics can help you get the answers you need, as well as to call out subscribers who don’t interact with your messaging in order to take steps towards re-engaging them.
While reengaging inactive subscribers is an excellent practice, there comes a point where it’s time to remove them from your list altogether. This will protect your sending reputation, as well as ensure that readers who don’t want to receive your messages won’t continue to have your emails sent to their spam or trash folders.
In addition, it’s important to always use double opt-in when acquiring new leads so that you can be sure they actually want to receive your emails. This will ensure that no one is signing up for your email list by accident and will also provide you with the data you need to prove that people are actually interested in your products or services.
Mastering your email list isn’t a quick fix, but with the right tools and strategies in place, you can keep your list lean and healthy, ensuring that all of your future digital marketing campaigns will be as successful as possible.
Reporting
Just like a garden, your email list requires a bit of maintenance. It’s important to periodically clean out your list, removing any dead emails or people who haven’t engaged in a while. Leaving low quality subscribers in your database can damage your reputation as a sender, leading to lower deliverability rates and increased spam folder complaints. It can also impact your ROI, as most email marketing providers charge based on the size of your contact list and the volume of email you send to it.
To help with this process, consider making your unsubscribe option readily available to your audience. This will prevent your list from growing stale, and may encourage those who don’t want to hear from you to exit the list completely rather than ignoring or marking you as spam.
It’s also a good idea to regularly check that your list is healthy, removing any hard bounces (an email that can’t be delivered) or repeated soft bounces (when an email isn’t delivered but for reasons such as full inboxes or server issues). This helps maintain your sender reputation and can help keep your delivery rate up.
You should also set up behavior-based automated sequences for inactive subscribers. This could involve a special offer or an emotional’miss you’ email to encourage them to return to the fold and boost your ROI. Anthropologie used this strategy, for example, to automate abandoned cart emails and drive more conversions.
Finally, always make it as easy as possible for your subscribers to sign up and opt-in. This is an essential aspect of email list management best practice as it ensures that those who do choose to give you their details have a stress-free experience.
Email list management is the foundation of your entire email marketing campaign. A bad list will do more harm than good, regardless of the content you put out. Use these six email list management best practices to create an email database that will propel your campaigns forward with precision and relevance. The more curated your list is, the better your engagement rates and ROI will be.
