You may have heard “The Money is in the List!” Email marketing can be a powerful tool for any business and it is still the lifeblood of every online business. Your email list will help drive sales and keep people informed about your products or services.
However, it’s important to remember that having a healthy email list is key to successful email marketing. Here are 10 tips for keeping your email list healthy and profitable.
10 Tips to Maintain a Healthy Email List
1. Connect with new subscribers.
You’ve gotten someone to sign up for your email list. Congrats! Now, how do you keep them there. When someone joins your list they are telling you that they are interested in what you have to offer. They want to get to know you and your business. Be sure to give them the opportunity to get to know you.
Send personalized emails. Include the contacts name. Ask them questions. Be genuinely interested in what they have to say. These are you customers or potential customers. It’s critical to know what their needs and wants are. Make a connection.
2. Send Emails
This may seem pretty obvious but I know a lot of people that build lists and never send emails to them. I have been one of these people. This is the quickest way to lose email subscribers.
You don’t send anything for 3 months, then you send out a broadcast email, and they don’t remember why they signed up. Then they’re gone. Or worse, they make a spam complaint and negatively impact your email deliverability.
3. Scrub your list regularly
Your open rate can have a big impact on the deliverability of your emails. ISPs can see how often emails you are sending are opened. You need to trim your list of people who are not opening your email.
If your contact hasn’t opened an email in the past 6 months it may be time to prune them from your list. We do this every 6 months and recommend that you do the same. At the very least, clean you email every year.
4. Re-engage inactive contacts
Do you want to give your inactive contacts a second chance? If so, create a re-engagement campaign for those on you list who haven’t opened an email in a while. This will require you to search and segment your list. Any email marketing program you use will have this ability.
Ask them if they want to continue getting emails. Remind them about why they joined your list. Let them know, again, what kind of information they will get when they open your emails. Ask them questions about what kind of information they would like you to send them. This can be a great learning experience for you to create more engagement with all of the people on your list.
5. Organize your list with segmentation
How are you acquiring people on your list? Are you using a lead magnet like a PDF giveaway? Are you entering customers from your brick and mortar business? Are they signing up on your website to get a monthly newsletter? Did they buy one of your products or services? Maybe it’s a combination of a few different ways. In most cases, business have several ways they acquire leads.
All of your leads should be on a “main” list but you may also want to divide your leads into segmented lists such as customer and potential customer or opted in for our newsletter and attended our promotional event. By doing this you can target the content that you provide to your subscribers and better serve them with what they are looking for.
6. Unsubscribing should be easy
It seems like this is the opposite of what we should be doing, right? We want to keep people on our email lists. We do. But we also don’t want to send emails to people who do not want them. This is how we get spam complaints and those can be deadly to an email marketing strategy.
The CAN-SPAM Act lays out the rules for commercial email and requires senders to give recipients the right to stop getting emails from you. Be sure to make it very clear how a contact can unsubscribe from your email list. While we don’t want to lose subscribers, those that opt out were not engaged in your content anyways.
7. Earn your list, don’t pay for it.
Never buy email lists. Ever. Companies that sell emails lists get them from everywhere online. Most emails are not vetted and none of them gave permission for YOU to send them content.
In many cases, a good majority of these emails are not even valid. Many are made up and aren’t real accounts. The deliverability is going to be terrible and if they do deliver, there is a good chance that you will get spam complaints.
8. Encourage your contacts to connect on other platforms
You need to build a relationship with your subscribers. If you want to take them from a lead to a paying customer or keep an existing customer paying for your stuff, they need to know, like and trust you. These relationships are built with interactions.
What other platforms are you active on? Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest? Whatever it is, be sure to drive them to these platforms to have another touch point for them to get to know you and your business.
9. Keep Up With Data Security Regulations
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are two data security regulations that all businesses need to be aware of when collecting customer information such as names, phone numbers, and emails addresses.
Make sure you understand these regulations so that you’re compliant with them when it comes time to send out emails or contact customers directly via their personal information.
10. Improve your email deliverability
It does you no good to have an email list and send out emails if no one receives them. There are steps you should consider taking if you are going to market your business with emails.
To improve your email deliverability follow the steps we’ve already covered. You should also look into authentication techniques that ensure the email originator is real. The three protocols to investigate are DMARC, DKIM and SPF.
Keeping your email list healthy is essential for a successful online business. With stringent regulations in the industry, it is essential that you focus on protecting the information given to you by your subscribers and providing useful, relevant and engaging content. Utilize these 10 tips to maintain a healthy email list, create a system of maintenance to ensure that your email list remains healthy and optimized. Be conscious of how often you communicate with each subscriber. Don’t be afraid to send too many emails.
How do you ensure that your email list stays healthy and optimized? Let me know in the comments.
I hope you found value with today’s post.
If you did, please leave a comment and share with your fellow digital marketers.
To Your Success!
Steve Stark
steve@starkwebdesign.com
262-378-0234
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