6 Tips For Better Email List Management

Email as a marketing channel is absolutely adored by marketers all over the world. And well, why shouldn’t they? It is cost-effective, allows you to deliver personalized and targeted messages, has an immediate impact, is easy to get started with, and above all, provides the highest ROI among all available channels out there.

Have you ever stopped to wonder, though, what lies at the heart of a successful email campaign? A healthy and loyal email list. Building a strong and evergreen email list, however, is no mean feat. It requires you to have a dedicated and disciplined email list management protocol in place.

 New to the world of email list management?

Don’t worry; you’re not late to the party. In this article, we take you through 6 highly effective email list management best practices. Implementing these will surely enable you to get on top of your email list hygiene.

But before that, let’s find out what email list management is all about, to begin with.

What is Email List Management?

Email list management is an umbrella term that refers to multiple practices such as collecting information from your subscribers, segmenting your email lists, cleaning and scrubbing the contacts on the list, analyzing subscriber behavior, and the like.

From helping you identify your most and least engaged customers to empowering you to devise targeted campaigns for each, email list management essentially allows you to engage with your customers in the most optimal manner possible.

Besides building healthy and long-lasting customer relationships, email list management also paves the path for improved resource management, giving rise to an enhanced sender reputation, better email deliverability as well as higher user engagement rates. Simply put, email list management is, in many ways, the primary driving force behind a winning email marketing strategy.

Email List Management Best Practices

While acquiring new contacts to your subscriber list is, no doubt, a central part of growing your business, managing those contacts efficiently is just as crucial. The presence of too many disengaged customers in your email list could end up dealing a crushing blow to your list’s deliverability. If not weeded out, they can hurt your key performance indicators (KPI) as well.

This is what makes email list management an indispensable component of your email marketing strategy. Let’s look at some list management best practices that will enable you to exercise total control over your email database and deliver the ultimate customer experience in the process.

1. Set Up Your Opt-in Forms Properly

Making sure your opt-in forms are set up properly will allow you to collect your subscribers’ consent right at the out, saving you from their ire in the times to follow. As a result, you are able to build a healthy list that is composed entirely of qualified and interested prospects.

Not to mention all the valuable time you’ll be saving yourself because you no longer have to be worried about filtering disengaged or uninterested customers.

There are a few things you must bear in mind while setting up your opt-in form:

• Be absolutely honest and transparent with your offerings. Do not make false promises for the sake of amassing more subscribers. This way, you’ll lose them at twice (or more) the rate at which you acquired them. Remember, there’s perhaps no greater vice for a brand than to overpromise and underdeliver.
• Avoid asking anything beyond essential contact information from your subscribers, which in most cases is just their name and email address. After all, that’s all you need to send them messages, right? Afterward, you may consider collecting their company name and birth date from them. Anything beyond these, and you risk brewing trust issues in your customers’ minds.
• Before you start sending marketing emails to your subscribers, ensure that you have their consent. You can do so by including an optional checkbox in your opt-in forms. That way, those who decide to subscribe to your list already know what’s coming their inboxes’ way.
• Verify your new contacts or subscribers with a double opt-in. Doing so will allow you not just to get rid of invalid email addresses but also build an email list consisting of only qualified and high-quality leads. Besides, it’ll also contribute towards strengthening your sender reputation (both in the eyes of your subscribers as well your Internet Service Provider).

2. Welcome New Subscribers

Making your new subscribers feel welcome can go a long way towards earning their loyalty and goodwill. When someone opts into your subscriber list for the first time, their interest and excitement regarding your brand are at their peak.

A well-thought-out welcome email lets you capitalize on these very sentiments. Alternatively, you also have the choice of greeting them with an entire onboarding email sequence.

Use your welcome emails to thank the subscribers for joining your list. Personalize the content to make them further endearing. Besides expressing your gratitude, you could also utilize onboarding emails to showcase your best products and content to them.

Above all, inform them how they can adjust their preferences, contact you, and unsubscribe from your communications. This will take your sender reputation a notch higher in your subscribers’ eyes.

Take a look at how the best in the business go about their welcome emails.

3. Let Subscribers Determine The Email Frequency

Most people unsubscribe from email lists simply because they’re put off by the constant waves of brand and marketing emails that flood their inboxes. Hitting your subscribers with an excess of emails has many cons, but the two primary ones are these:

• It lowers your click-through and open rates.
• It significantly hampers your brand reputation.

Hence, the best course of action is to let your subscribers choose the frequency of emails they want to receive from you. This will dramatically reduce the likelihood of your emails ending up in their spam folders.

If you wish to further improve the customer experience, you can collect their product preferences. Accordingly, you can send them emails in the future that revolve exclusively around their areas of interest.

Here’s an example of such an email.

4. Don’t Make Unsubscribing Difficult

With the primary objective of all businesses being to keep as many contacts as possible on their list, we understand that this tip might be a touch counter-intuitive for many. But if you really want your business to have a solid and loyal customer base, then you must give your customers the liberty of unsubscribing from your list whenever they want to.

Making unsubscribing difficult for your customers will only cause them to mark all your future communications as spam.

To avoid this fate, ensure that your emails include a prominent unsubscribe button. Besides, look at the silver lining here- if someone is unsubscribing from your list, they were most likely never engaged with your brand in the first place. Therefore, allowing uninterested customers to opt-out of their own volition spares you the trouble of weeding them out on your own.

5. Harness The Potential of Segmentation

Segmenting your email list allows you to deliver highly targeted and personalized emails to your subscribers. Subsequently, this paves the path for more significant interaction and engagement, eventually leading to higher conversion rates.

To make the most of segmentation, however, you must have utmost clarity regarding the segmentation parameters based on which you want to divide your customers.

Besides the staple criteria of gender, geographic location, ethnicity, and age, you might also want to explore the parameters of purchase history, website engagement levels, and customer position in the sales funnel to fetch improved results.

As discussed earlier, the success of your email marketing campaigns is determined by the quality of your communications and not the quantity. With email list segmentation, exercising quality checks becomes that much more convenient.

6. Take Action On Your Unengaged Contacts

You have two options when it comes to dealing with unengaged subscribers on your list- either try and regain their attention with the help of curated re-engagement campaigns or eliminate them altogether. Whatever you do, don’t let such contacts lie dormant on your list, for they’ll end up being a massive drain on your time and resources in the longer run.

Devising and implementing a personalized email campaign is no mean feat, and you’d ideally want to put that kind of effort into greeting the ones who have no attachment whatsoever towards your brand.

Having said that, we also understand if you want to give them one last chance before removing them from your list. Sometimes, a few buyers tend to go off the radar after a few initial purchases, and the sensible thing to do is to check up on them once prior to taking evasive action.

The best course of action, thus, in these cases, is to shoot a re-engagement campaign their way. If done right, a re-engagement campaign can retrieve a significant chunk of your inactive customers.

Take a look at these examples to understand how you can go about your re-engagement emails.

Wrapping It Up

Getting on top of your email list management practices can help you skyrocket your ROI, besides empowering your brand to soar miles and miles above its competitors. Grow your list organically, look after its hygiene, maintain it religiously, and the results will automatically follow.