7 Reasons Why You Should Clean Your Email List Regularly
The value of your email list is only as good as its health. One of the most important, regular tasks of any email marketing campaign is to ensure that you perform maintenance on your mailing list. During maintenance, you should be removing any contacts that regularly bounce or aren’t responding to campaigns.
Here are seven reasons to make cleaning your mailing list a regular task.
1. It Saves Costs
The more people you have on your mailing list, the more it will cost you to run it. Normally this is not done on a per subscriber price. For instance, those with 999 subscribers on Fluttermail cost $17 per month, while those with 1001 subscribers cost $29 per month.
Research has found that about half of all subscribers are inactive. Therefore, a simple maintenance task can keep you in lower level pricinhg tiers.
2. It Improves Analysis
There are many reasons why subscribers become inactive. One reason might be because they’ve changed email addresses. If you have emails being sent to an inactive account, then you can’t analyse campaigns accurately because these dead accounts are skewing results.
Removing dead accounts allows you to focus on people who at least semi-regularly open your email campaigns.
3. Gives You Opportunities To Sell
While removing inactive subscribers is important, it shouldn’t be the first thing to do with subscribers who aren’t opening mail. Some people do read subject lines and go straight to your website to make a purchase. Therefore, when identifying those who aren’t responding any more, you should look to create a re-engagement campaign. Research has shown that inactive subscribers are worth about 32% of active subscribers.
This should encourage people to tell you they’re still interested in hearing from you. Those that don’t take any action can then be removed from your list.
4. Find Malicious Emails In Your Subscriber List
It’s important that you find those on your mailing list that are spam or malicious accounts. These email accounts can cause your business real harm. Email addresses within these categories should be removed without question.
Malicious email accounts can often be spotted manually because they don’t have corresponding names with email addresses or weird email addresses (i.e. XtrebleYU@domain.co.uk).
5. You Can Remove Subscribers That Have No Value To You
Sometimes people subscribe to your business’ mailing list who have no value to you. For instance, if you sell only in the US, Canada or another country and you get subscribers from the EU, Russia or another area, then you can remove those subscribers.
Those that aren’t of value to your organisation are just costing you money and skewing your statistics. They’re also getting irrelevant content which won’t help with your reputation.
6. Its Easier To Do It Regularly
When you have thousands of subscribers on your mailing list, if you only check them rarely, then it will take up a lot of your time. Instead, checks done on a regular basis take up less time and allow you to be more responsive to changes.
Regular checks can be scheduled every one to three months. It shouldn’t take any more than a few hours work, but it can save hundreds of dollars a year.
7. It’s Good For Compliance
There are lots of email marketing laws that protect consumers from illicit marketing emails. While subscribers might have signed up, that doesn’t always mean that they want to receive marketing content. They just don’t read the sign-up details properly. In addition, some subscribers might try to unsubscribe from your mailing list, but don’t complete the process.
By regularly scheduling in maintenance for your mailing list, you can remove people who have no interest in your marketing content and comply with legal requirements.
Conclusion
Maintaining your email marketing list is really important. It can help your business to be more effective in marketing, finances and compliance. Therefore, you should always be looking at doing maintenance every one to three months.
When was the last time you completed maintenance on your email list? When do you next plan to do this?
Let us know in the comments below.
Image via Pixabay.
Read post Post a Comment. Tagged in: email marketing, list maintenance, list management
Email Marketing Newsletters: Your List Management Checklist
Maintenance of your email marketing list is vitally important. If you don’t manage your list properly you can suffer from low responses to your campaigns and higher costs as subscribers become less active on your list.
At the same time you might be missing out on potential sales by not moving subscribers to the right list and selling to them in different ways.
Email marketing maintenance, if done properly, won’t take your marketing team long, especially if you follow these simple rules.
For your convenience, here is our quick checklist and process on how you can better manage your subscriber list and achieve greater results from your email marketing.
1. Check For Those Who Haven’t Opened Your Emails
Those who haven’t opened your emails for a while are going to be either inactive (i.e. their email address has been abandoned) or have lost interest in your messages. Both of these happen from time to time and therefore each month you need to check for non-opens. Look for those that haven’t opened your messages for about 6-12 months and mark them up.
2. Check For Bounces
Anyone who hard bounces should be automatically removed from your email marketing list. If someone is soft bouncing, it is an indication that their inbox is full. An account that is soft bouncing continuously is probably not active and so should be removed.
3. Send Re-engagement Emails
Anyone who has not opened their emails for awhile should be sent one last campaign to try to re-engage them.
4. Delete Those Who Don’t Respond To Re-engagement Campaigns
If someone does not interact with your re-engagement campaign within a month, then you should immediately remove them from your email marketing list.
5. Check Those Who Have Been Clicking Through
Have you looked at those who have been clicking through on your campaigns lately? Have they been making orders or otherwise engaging with your brand? If not then you need to reach out to them. Sometimes you can enhance the success of your email marketing campaigns by picking up the phone and speaking to the contact.
Tell them that you’ve noticed they’ve been looking at certain products and ask them if they have any questions. Then consider talking to them about their concerns and see how you can resolve them.
6. Move Contacts Between Subscription Lists
You probably have numerous subscription lists based on what the customer is looking at. For instance, if you are a book seller, you will have lists for those that like different genres. Sometimes you might notice that contacts change their buying habits and therefore, require a different set of emails to successfully promote to them.
Switching subscription segregations can help you improve results and provide more accurately what the customer is looking for.
7. Connect Staff, Social Media And Email List
Your staff and social media can tell you a lot about what customers are looking for. If you notice that your customers are talking about a different range of products more on social media, moving them to that marketing list might be a good idea.
Likewise, if staff are noticing more calls for information on different products, swapping lists would be a good idea.
8. Have You Scheduled In The Next Update?
How often you perform maintenance depends on a number of different factors. If you send out daily emails, try sitting down every two weeks to perform these checks. If you send emails once a month, sit down every six months.
Conclusion
Your email marketing list needs regular maintenance to make it more effective. By completing the above process on a regular basis you can refine the success of your campaigns, save money and earn more revenue. Just remember to do this regularly before your list becomes too unhealthy.
When was the last time you performed maintenance on your email marketing list? What were the direct results from that maintenance?
Let us know in the comments below.
Read post Post a Comment. Tagged in: email list, Email Strategy, list maintenance, newsletters, segmentation