5 Best Practices For Managing Your Email List

Email marketing is one of the most effective tools a small business owner has at their disposal. For decades email has been effective at communicating with customers and great at converting leads into sales. But it’s not just about churning out loads of messages as fast as possible -- it’s about managing and growing a healthy database of contacts and personalizing the experience.

One of the places many business owners hit a snag is when it comes to email mailing lists. Many think that the more email addresses you have the better. If you can buy a list with 100,000 emails then you have a bigger chance of winning new customers, right? Wrong. Sending emails like that will only get your domain flagged for SPAM and make it hard or even impossible for you to get in actual customers’ mailboxes in the future.

So how can you maintain and grow an effective email list? Here are a few best practices…

Make It Personal

If you want to send effective emails you want to make your content as relevant as possible and this starts in your email list with segmentation. Create personalized lists within your contact database so you can send emails based on…

Location
Gender
Interests
Birthday
Company
Industry

…and everything else you can think of! It all depends on what data you have at your disposal.

When managing your list make sure you add in as much contact information as possible. If you know something about a contact add it in! Add additional parameters to contact forms or ecommerce checkout pages so you can input additional information to your database and send more targeted messages. Don’t be lazy! Just adding a first name and email address really puts you at a disadvantage when it comes to sending personalized emails, which are always the most effective.

You can set up auto-sorted lists that will constantly refresh and add new contacts to certain lists based on information contained in their listing. Setting these up makes it easy to keep your list sorted and current!

Keep It Clean

A great exercise to take on every once in a while (once a quarter or even every six months) is to go through your list and clean out bad contacts. What this entails is sorting through contacts and removing the ones that have had…

A hard bounce
A few soft bounces

Also sort through contacts and remove ones who are very unengaged. A good rule of thumb is to remove contacts who…

Have not opened an email ever
Have not opened or engaged with a single email you have sent them in the last 6-12 months

The logic here is that you want to send to people who you may be able to win over. Also your email marketing sending provider likely charges by list size so why pay for a huge list filled with contacts that will never open your emails?

In many email marketing tools you can create filters that will sort contacts into lists based on these parameters making it easy to track contacts who are meeting the criteria you have established for deletion.

Don’t Buy Contacts

It may be tempting but buying contacts is hardly ever worth it. First of all you would be in violation of SPAM laws and could face legal backlash, which would be a bummer. But more so because it is never worth the money. The emails in the sold lists are always poor quality and full of fake addresses and spam traps.

Adding in thousands of fake and spam trap emails into your contact list will degrade your list and be a pain to remove. This will also cause your emails to hit the spam folder more often even for your real contacts! And to add more insult to injury you could even be dropped from your email sending service for violating their Terms of Service over spam. No bueno!

Say Hello

The most important email you will ever send your subscriber is your welcome email. On average welcome emails have an 82 percent open rate, according to MailChimp, while all other emails generally sit around 21 percent. That is HUGE.

When you set up your email list make sure that they don’t just get put into a huge pool of contacts right off the bat! Set up a short welcome series to take advantage of that short window of increased engagement.

Structuring a welcome email is a whole other can of worms for a future post but what you can include as far as maintaining your list is an opportunity for your new subscriber to get to know your brand and give them an opportunity to adjust their email preferences. If they are someone who would rather get fewer messages this is a great time for them to tell you that. This keeps them on the list and signals to you how to best communicate with them.

Let Contacts Choose

If you plan on emailing subscribers everyday then that’s great, but not everyone wants to get emails that often. Instead of alienating some people, give them the chance to tell you how often they want to hear from you!

If you have the capability with your email service allow subscribers to change their email frequency settings instead of just giving them the option to only subscribe or unsubscribe. This will keep people on your list who are interested in your business but not super interested in your communication style. This will also give you some insight into your subscribers. You can create some specifically tailored messages to those who prefer to receive fewer messages so they still hear about everything you have going on.

Final Thoughts

Maintaining a healthy email list doesn’t have to take a ton of time out of your day -- but you can’t ignore it! Take a little time to clean up your list and start segmenting now and check back in periodically and your list will get in shape in no time.