Maintaining your email list is one way to get the most out of your email campaigns. It is also essential to earning outstanding results from your email marketing efforts.
Learning and practicing email list management keeps your target audience engaged. Not to mention, it also saves you more money. So, we gathered 11 best practices and tools for you to succeed in your email marketing campaigns.
But first, let us better understand what email list management is.
What is Email List Management?
Email list management is managing and controlling your email subscriber lists and segments. It also oversees different processes, such as maintaining updated segmentation and tagging, removing fake addresses, and updating your contact list.
This email marketing strategy allows you to send more targeted email campaigns, which is vital to delivering highly-converting email campaigns.
Importance of Email List Management
Unopened emails and those that end up in spam folders affect your business’s reputation as a sender. It can also damage the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Although you obviously can’t stop this process, you can organize your list to eliminate the clutter and get better results.
Below is a list of some benefits of email list management:
Wholesome Connections With Your Audience
Email marketing performs best when businesses consider subscribers’ interests. The more relevant deals and high-quality content you share with your audience, the longer-lasting relationships you’ll build.
Saving Resources
People with active email addresses who are interested make up an adequately managed email list.
It also improves email delivery, sender reputation, and user engagement and decreases bounces. By avoiding sending emails to recipients who refuse to receive them, you will save more time and money.
More Accurate Results
You can monitor the effectiveness of your email marketing by looking at statistics like open rate, CTR, unsubscribe rate, and many more. Having a solid email list will help you to rely on these analytics.
11 Email List Management Best Practices and Tools
1. Set Up Your Opt-in Forms Properly
Properly setting up your opt-in forms ensures that your forms are secure to add new contacts to your database. It also correctly collects user content. As a result, you’ll save more time and energy from filtering subscribers who are uninterested.
You should also adhere to the following guidelines while creating your signup forms:
- Be clear and upfront with your users about what they are signing up for. You don’t want to use false promises to entice customers to subscribe to your service.
- Only request basic personal information from your visitors, such as name and email address. You can collect any more information (like company name or birthday) afterward. In most circumstances, that’s all you need to send relevant material to your audience.
- If you intend to send marketing emails to your contacts, be sure to have their permission. You can achieve this by including a checkbox that users can use to subscribe to your list.
- Give subscribers more details on accessing their privacy policy information, modifying or having their data removed, and how you plan to handle user data.
- Use confirmed opt-in as much as possible to identify incorrect email addresses and validate new email subscribers quickly.
2. Offer Frequency Options
Everybody has a different schedule. By providing several frequency options, you can make it simple for individuals to fit your content into their calendars. These options can be displayed as:
- Below the signup form or pop-up, allowing users to choose their favorite option immediately
- In a subscriber profile that functions as a landing page
- In an email
The options listed above all function similarly. You’ll know who exactly wants to get your email since subscribers will be added to (or deleted from) a specific group depending on their chosen option.
3. Greet New Email Subscribers with a Welcome Email
Greeting your contact list with a welcome email positively affects your sender’s reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail and Yahoo.
The welcome email’s objectives are to inform new subscribers that they have been added to your email list. They also provide them with a preview of the information they will receive.
So, send them automated and personalized emails. Welcome emails are helpful for email list management because they help you get off to a good start with each new member.
4. Use Tags, Folders, and Filters
There is a default filter and category label for each provider. Your requirements and priorities, however, can vary from the other person. Therefore, these choices can permanently be changed.
To better organize your priorities, you may set up your filters to send separate emails to particular folders and create tags and categories. Navigating essential interactions with these small folders, bookmarks, and filters is also simple.
5. Contact Tags and Segmentation
Depending on user interests, you can divide your email list to send customized content that suits your readers’ choices.
Delivering the same information can cause them to lose interest quickly. Therefore, it’s vital to understand that every one of your readers has unique wants and interests.
You can use segmentation to create newsletters tailored to the interests and stages of the customer journey of each subscriber. Your email list will also be separated into multiple mini-lists due to segmentation, giving it an excellent structure.
While segmentation makes it possible to divide your subscribers into categories according to their interests, there are instances when you need to focus your targeting even further to reach your consumers.
You can also create variations within your segments by using contact tags to offer additional personalization to your email list.
Contact tags come in a variety of forms. For instance, you can categorize users based on their behaviors by assigning tags like “opened webinar” or “downloaded ebook.” Using content tags, you can quickly determine where they are in the conversion process and what to send them.
6. Re-engage with Inactive Subscribers
It’s relatively easy to re-engage your audience. Nevertheless, engaging your disinterested subscribers in conversation demands a certain level of email copy and CTA expertise.
You can find inactive subscribers by watching their activity and providing all the necessary information. Once you have them, you should launch re-engagement campaigns to remind them of their original motivation for signing up.
7. Remove Unengaged Subscribers and Invalid Email Addresses
Removing inactive subscribers who don’t respond to emails is another excellent practice for managing your email list. This person might have switched jobs and stopped using the work email address.
Additionally, if you don’t employ the double opt-in method, the subscriber might have typed an inaccurate email address, and the contact still ended up on your email list. Due to these bogus contacts, your bounce rate will be significant when you send email blasts.
It will also affect your email deliverability rate. Therefore, regularly clean your email list and remove any invalid addresses from your contact list to avoid this. To filter them, look for email bounces.
8. Use a Shared Mailbox to Manage Group Emails
When using team email, it’s common for teams to avoid selecting a shared mailbox with best practices for corporate email administration.
As you know, an incoming message is copied to every member of an email group. That implies everyone should read it, even those with nothing to do with it. Everyone in the group wastes time opening and reading it. Hence, it is a time waster.
However, you can solve this issue with a shared mailbox. Everyone on the team has a mailbox by default. So when one team member reads, responds to, or gets a message, the other team members know it has been sent.
9. Use an Email Service Provider
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The main benefit of using an email marketing platform or service provider is the ability to control deliverability, content, and client data. Another advantage of working with an email service provider is.
InboxAlly is the ultimate deliverability tool that experts and email service providers use to resolve complex email deliverability issues.
10. Use A/B Testing to Determine What Works
You can determine how healthy emails function using A/B or split testing. The most successful email is sent to the rest of the list after you send two versions to two smaller subsets of your send list.
With your email, you can test out two strategies, and the one that does the best should be used to contact the rest of your list.
Although it may seem complicated, it is not a manual task. Instead, your email marketing software should take care of this.
Email marketers use this to test subject lines, send times, whether a button or a hyperlink performs better for a CTA (call-to-action), and whether two different designs are more eye-catching than the other.
There are numerous options, but testing one aspect simultaneously on two comparable emails is preferable. For instance, start by trying just the subject line. You will know which element to credit for the results if you test more than two at a time.
11. Use an Email List Management Software
Finding an email marketing tool that can calculate your return on investment for any campaign might be beneficial. It enables you to monitor whether the resources invested in your campaign are producing worthwhile outcomes.
These three email list management tools—MailChimp, Hubspot, and CampaignMonitor—are all excellent. You can launch email marketing campaigns, manage your email lists, and track your outcomes with the help of an email marketing platform.
Most email marketing tools will also assist you in expanding your mailing lists and maintaining the data.
Extra Tip: Do Not Buy Email Lists
The worst decision you could ever make is purchasing a mailbox. You’ll pay more for ready lists because they include audiences unrelated to your product or service and fake email addresses.
Manage Your Email List Today
To succeed in your email marketing efforts, you should get devoted and active subscribers. You can also increase your ROI and ensure your marketing initiative’s success with a well-managed email list.
However, you must remember that quality is not measured by numbers but by results, regardless of how many individuals you sign up for.
Try InboxAlly! Book a live demo to discover how it can make your email campaigns successful.