How to Manage an Email Marketing List
Email marketing is about more than just acquiring email addresses, including an opt-out and unsubscribe process and sending email campaigns to your subscribers. In order for an email marketing list to become and remain successful, and produce results, it must be properly maintained. If you are new to email marketing you are probably wondering how one can effectively clean up an email list. Rest assured that maintaining a clean email list isn’t difficult. In fact, email hygiene is probably far easier than you imagine.
Get Rid of Bad Email Addresses and Manage Bounces
Sure, all marketers do their best to ensure that their email list doesn’t contain any bad email addresses. However, that doesn’t prevent their list from getting them. Bad email addresses creep into email lists because eventually some email addresses will go “bad” over time. This happens for a number of reasons:
· Subscribers may change jobs – so they are no longer using their initial company email address
· An email account becomes abandoned
· Subscribers closing their email accounts
· Their email inbox becomes full and is no longer accepting new messages
Sending messages to these email accounts will only result in the email being registered as a bounced email which in turn negatively affects your sender reputation. Avoid this by periodically going through your email list and deleting “bad” email addresses. A good way to do this is to set a “bounce threshold” where once an email bounces a certain number of times, it gets deleted. Bad email addresses can be identified for removal by using email address validation software, such as ListWise.
Get Rid of Inactive or Non-Engaged Subscribers
If your email list contains people who are inactive or non-engaged then remove them. Some marketers like to keep these people on their list because the cost of sending them marketing campaign after marketing campaign is zero. However, the benefit of having them on your mailing list is also zero. They do not add to your bottom line. There is literally no benefit in saying that you have a list of 10,000 people if less than 50% of them are engaged.
If you do not wish to remove them as yet you can put them in a category called “low activity” users and send them a special email in order to see what would get them to become engaged. However, merely treating them the same as your other users will not add value to your operations.
Remember that as a marketer one of your most valuable tools is your email list and no marketer needs an email list that is non-engaging and one that could ruin their reputation. Make every effort to practice email list cleaning.