Email Marketing Lists: Keep Them Clean with Automation

Every day, businesses compile contacts to form their email marketing lists. Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways of communicating with your audience. In fact, 99% of people check their email daily!

Pruning your email marketing list consistently helps to influence favorable statistics. For the unacquainted, the vast majority of email marketing platforms offer insights into campaign data, such as deliverability, open rates, and click-through rates. Paying close attention to these metrics not only reduces your likelihood of being marked as spam, it drives sales activity, too.

Keep Your Email Marketing Lists Clean

Regular maintenance makes up a large portion of successful email marketing. When perusing your email marketing lists, dig into individual user engagement. See a contact that has never opened a campaign? Unsubscribe them. Otherwise, the lack of activity greatly harms email deliverability in the long run. Basically, that could increase the chances that your campaign will be marked as spam.

Similarly, if you see contacts with high bounce rates, we recommend clipping them as quickly as possible. While email marketers can verify domains and write strategic subject lines to limit bounce frequency, in most cases, those solutions can be negligible.

However, not all “bounces” are permanent. In email marketing, a hard bounce reflects permanent issues. For example, perhaps the email address was typed incorrectly, or the person left the organization, and their account was shut down.

On the other hand, a soft bounce refers to temporary factors blocking an email campaign. There could be issues with the email receiving server, firewall, or maybe the person simply maxed out their inbox storage. Having said that, contacts with too many soft bounces will typically be automatically marked as a hard bounce in the eyes of most email marketing platforms.

Give Your Contacts the Power to Manage Subscriptions

Unfortunately, many major corporations attempt to bury unsubscribe buttons. Alternatively, users who attempt to unsubscribe may not actually wind up unsubscribed. Not only does this represent an ethical infraction, it also negatively impacts deliverability down the road. For instance, frustrated subscribers may quickly turn from trying to unsubscribe to simply marking a campaign as spam.

Overall, this is a very dated, spam-heavy approach to email marketing. While many countries (especially those in Europe) have new laws regarding spam, the United States remain under-regulated. Our rule of thumb is to unsubscribe those who indicate they don’t want to receive email communication. Not only does this act in good faith, it protects email deliverability and the brand as a whole.

That said, many companies wish to get in front of that request. As a helpful tip, consider implementing a double opt-in feature. Essentially, email marketing lists with double opt-in request users to verify their subscription after initially signing up. This two-step process quickly vets email contacts.

Re-engage Your Email Marketing Lists

While removing and unsubscribing contacts from your email marketing lists are helpful steps, what about those who would rather keep their list intact? Introducing the re-engagement campaign. For segmented subscribers who have demonstrated a lack of preliminary interest, many organizations instead plan to approach them from a slightly different context.

Email marketers employ personalized language (including subject lines), special offers, and unique content that hasn’t been previously tested. This approach embraces the subscribers for better or worse and shows them that, as a brand, you’re taking the initiative to get to know them. Before cutting subscribers completely loose, you might ask whether there’s something you can do to bring them back into the fold.

Automate Your Email Marketing Lists

Last but not least, email automation became a game-changer over the past decade. Too busy running the operation to concentrate on email marketing lists? Create one all-encompassing automation to personalize engagement for each contact. After wrapping up initial testing, email automations react to subscribers based on their interaction.

As an example, if a subscriber opens a campaign but doesn’t click, resend the campaign a week later. Perhaps they were busy at the moment. Meanwhile, for the subscribers that click a certain link, mention that in the copy of the follow-up campaign, showing that you’ve noticed their behavior. Email automations not only drive engagement, they can facilitate subscription data and remove tedious little steps from the daily process.

Building Your Email Marketing Campaign

At its core, managing email marketing lists really comes down to treating people like people. With only a handful of metrics to track, such as deliverability, bounce rates, open rates, and click rates, the process can be straightforward compared to other digital marketing avenues.

While unsubscribing users makes the most sense at times, there are often numerous paths to building a successful campaign. To launch your email strategy, contact the digital marketing specialists at Rizzo Young Marketing.