You know that having email lists are important to grow your business. That’s why you’ve invested time and money building yours. So, it can be frustrating when your list isn’t working the way you want it to in regard to your email marketing efforts. Does one of the following scenarios feel familiar?
My email open rates have suddenly dropped. Increase your email open rates
No one is clicking on the links inside my emails. Improve your marketing with email results
My email lists don’t seem to be engaged. Keep reading! This blog is for you.
Maintaining your email lists
It’s undeniable that building an email list is important to growing your business. And while there are hundreds of blogs about building email lists, few mention how to maintain them.
However, when your email lists are not well-maintained, they stop working for you. The best subject lines in the world can’t revive poorly maintained email lists!
More importantly, if your email list isn’t clean, it can get you flagged as a spammer—and no one wants that! So, let’s discuss a few options for cleaning up your email lists and ensure that both you and your potential customer are getting something from them.
Segmenting your email lists
After a while, the members on your email list may start to feel like little more than a number. That’s because when your email lists lack segmenting, it’s inevitable that content will start to feel broad and watered down as you try to appease the masses. One way to personalize the experience of individuals on your list (and earn their ongoing business!) is to show them they matter to you. Receiving an email that is tailored to their tastes, budget, or experiences is a simple way to stand out in someone’s inbox.
Also referred to as segmenting, this essentially means to sort your emails into groups. While the initial sorting will undoubtedly take you some time, setting this infrastructure up within your email platform can help you reach more long-term marketing goals.
Email list scrubbing
The truth is that it’s completely normal for some leads on your email list to become less engaged over time. From changes in their day-to-day habits to no longer needing your products or services, you may run into a hard but simple truth regarding some addresses on your list: they no longer want to be part of your world.
While it can be hard to let go, that’s exactly what you’ll need to do if you want to see engagement of your email lists rise.
Cleaning or “scrubbing” your email list simply means to delete or archive emails from your list that are no longer active. The first time you do this, it’s hard. And there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Businesses have been known to lose over half their email lists this way.
But when you want more engagement with your email content, you’ve got to say goodbye to the leads who are no longer opening it.
Here are two options for scrubbing your email list:
First, go through your list and one-by-one and delete emails that have low or no engagement. Many email platforms give leads a rating or a way to look at how they’ve engaged with you over time, enabling you to decide whether a lead should stay or be sent to the archives.
A second way to clean up your email list is to send a re-engagement campaign to your list. Typically, a re-engagement campaign consists of up to five emails containing a special offer, a free download, or similar. Those leads who open emails from this short, sweet campaign—even if it’s only one email—remain on your email list. However, any lead that does not open your emails during this campaign need to be archived.
Enhance your email marketing lists
While segmenting your email lists is a great place to start, there could be other reasons your email list is no longer engaged with your content. A fairly common issue is out-of-date information. Whether a customer misspelled their information in your form or they’ve updated their information but forgot to tell you, bad data and old contact information can wreak havoc on an email list.
Partnering with a big data company who can help you enhance your existing data including your list of emails will increase your efficiency ensuring you reach the right contacts even faster.
Clean up your email lists
It’s always exciting when someone new signs up for your email list. However, on occasion, a user will sign up for your email list multiple times. Maybe they were interested in multiple offers you sent or perhaps they forgot they signed up to begin with. Either way, checking your email list for duplicates and deleting any that you find is an excellent way to clean up your list and potentially boost engagement.
Maintaining your email lists is an incredibly important in the world of email marketing. A lot of businesses treat their email lists as a “set it and forget it” task when in reality, they require quite a bit of time and attention in order to offer results.
Don’t have time to maintain your email lists in the way the deserve? Turn to the experts at Data Axle™ USA. As a trusted big data company we offer the following services:
Email list updates
We’ll take outdated email addresses on your list, called “bounces”, and provide each user’s new email address (where available).
Email hygiene services
Correct common misspellings, add missing characters to the domain name and extension, and flag potentially bad emails containing foul language.
Email suppression services
Submit your email list and we’ll return any records that match our Global Suppression File of undeliverable addresses or that contain identifiers known to cause spam flagging.
We also offer creative and deployment services for your email campaigns, taking the pressure off of you to maintain regular, ongoing communication with your list. Our goal is to help you reach your audience by writing thoughtful messages, creating unique design elements, and building beautiful templates. Plus, we’ll deliver and track your campaign for you, ensuring a successful send.
