What do you prefer? Do you want to work in a team of 30 unmotivated employees or with just five colleagues who radiate enthusiasm from start to finish? If you ask us, we would prefer the latter.
When it comes to email lists, our focus is often on quantity, not quality. It's certainly a good thing to see more people on your list, but not when your email performance and results are taking a toll because half the subscribers are inactive.
Achieve long-term email success with managing a good email list
A high quality email list with active subscribers does bring some benefits. This will result in more engagement, higher deliverability and less chance of ending up in the dreaded spam filter. We would therefore like to give you a number of tips to properly manage your e-mail list.
What is Email List Management?
Email list management is a process of maintaining a healthy list. During this process you will remove inactive subscribers from your contact database. It is important to keep this up to date, because the involvement of people can change over time. Gradually they may lose interest. If this happens, it's better to unsubscribe them from your list. We are happy to explain why.
With every e-mail campaign you send out into the world, e-mail providers will keep track of a number of things such as following up on spam complaints. When subscribers click the “Mark as Spam” button in their inboxes, that's bad news for you. In addition, it also looks at opening, clicking, unsubscribing and inactivity. If your subscribers are interested in your content and there is interaction, don't worry. However, if engagement is low, it's time to get to work.
Finally, email providers will also notice the bounced emails; a situation that occurs when your email doesn't reach the subscriber's inbox. If you want to avoid this as much as possible, it is best to check your email list regularly. This way you can remove any typos or invalid addresses from the list.
Why should I manage my email list?
The people who open, read and display your email campaigns are your quality subscribers. Interaction includes various actions. For example, the subscriber can simply click a button, fill out a questionnaire or visit your website.
To manage a healthy email list, it is important to integrate email list management into your marketing or communication strategy. By drawing attention to this, you can leave out subscribers who won't add value to the business. After all, it's best to focus on a smaller number of higher quality subscribers who interact with you and your business.
1. Validate Your Email List
While growing your list, one thing is inevitable; you are guaranteed to get invalid email addresses on your list one day. As long as you validate the list regularly, there is no problem.
It is therefore important to identify inactive inboxes, as they are often a favorite place for spam messages. If there happens to be an inactive email address on the list, it can result in a significant drop in your sender reputation, causing your future campaigns to end up in the spam box.
Fortunately, there are email validation tools that can help you identify inactive email addresses. These tools analyze your list and locate the emails that have actions that could hurt your delivery rate. For your validation you can, for example, use MailerCheckThis tool offers you a helping hand when checking your addresses.
2. Welcome subscribers with a personalized email
Welcome emails are a convenient way to welcome all your new subscribers in an automated way. They are not only easy, but also highly effective.
These types of emails are often sent very quickly after someone has subscribed. As a result, they also have an open rate that is 4x higher than a standard email marketing campaign.
So start every new subscriber relationship right with a personalized email. Take the opportunity to engage your audience and get to know them better right away.
3. Segment your email list
Keeping a clean list is all about maintaining engagement with your readers. You can do this by segmenting your list so you can send personalized content that fits each readers interests.
Not all of your readers are interested in the same content, so segmenting your email list is a good idea to send targeted emails.
You can segment subscribers based on engagement, gender, age, location, the list goes on and on. Within each segmentation you can send more targeted content.
4. Give the option to unsubscribe
It's absolutely nothing personal, but sometimes people just aren't interested or need something new. Unsubscribing is therefore completely okay, so include an unsubscribe link in every email you send.
Make sure this link is visible and easy to click. Hiding this option may lead to a spam complaint. These spam reports can then be put on various blacklists. This can not only damage your reputation, but also the reputation of the email tool you use.
5. A/B test your campaigns
Sometimes, though, it's hard to know exactly what content your subscribers will go for. That's why A/B testing is your best friend: it takes the guesswork out and provides a statistic of the version that performs best.
