Maintaining your email list is the key to a healthy and effective email marketing strategy. Your list is a collection of people who have subscribed to hear from you by providing their emails and this is a privilege. By taking care of your email list, you’re ensuring it stays up-to-date so that it can be an effective part of your marketing strategy.
GET PERMISSION
Before you add anyone to your email list make sure they have subscribed to receive emails from you. Everyone on your list should have opted in to get emails from you. If you are unsure if you should add a person to your list, ask them!
KEEP A MASTER LIST
This means that every single subscriber you have must be on this list. Then, you can use groups to organize and further segment your subscribers. Keeping one master list will help you avoid compliance issues. An example is if someone unsubscribes from a list, wishing to unsubscribe from them all, and then they continue to get emails from you because it turns out they’re still on one of your other lists. Maintaining one master list will simplify your email management and even reduce your monthly cost.
RE-ENGAGE OR REMOVE INACTIVE SUBSCRIBERS
Inactive subscribers are people who haven’t opened an email campaign of yours for an extended period of time. Depending on the email service provider you are using, you can usually find these users in your lists dashboard, selecting your master list, identifying all those who have not opened at least your last five campaigns.
To re-engage, see all the people that have not opened all of the last five campaigns. This means that these people are really unengaged. Then, what you can do is create a segment containing all these people that have not opened the last five campaigns and then create an email campaign targeting them. This is an opportunity to re-engage with them and possibly win their business, but if they remain inactive after this win-back campaign, it is recommended that you remove them from your list. The goal is to keep your list fresh and engaged and this is a great way to do that.
DON’T LET YOUR LIST GO STALE
If you have large gaps of time in-between email campaigns, you run the risk of subscribers forgetting who you are and that they even opted-in to hear from your business. This means that they may unsubscribe or even mark your email as spam. Stale lists also are known to have lower open rates. If this does happen to you, you will want to reconfirm that subscriber’s interest in being on your list by sending out a new email campaign.
MONITOR YOUR BOUNCES
Bounces occur when an email can’t be delivered to an email address. When an email bounces, it’s classified as either a soft or hard bounce. Hard bounces happen when an email can’t be delivered. This can be caused by an invalid email address or by an unexpected error during sending. Soft bounces are recognized by the email server but are returned to the sender because a mailbox is either full or temporarily unavailable. High bounce rates are often caused by lists that have gone stale or addresses that were improperly entered or imported. If you haven’t sent a campaign in a while, reconfirm your list to keep your contact information up to date.
Hope this helps you in your marketing strategy. Maintaining a healthy list means continuing to grow your subscribers while taking care of the ones already on your list.
thewebpreneur 