How to Maintain a Clean Email List

As a business targeting success, your work doesn't end in acquiring email addresses and devising your Unsubscribe and opt-out process. There are a couple of things you would want to ensure are happening in order to keep a clean list and keep running a successful email marketing campaign. It is highly advisable, for instance, to use email validation services to determine validity and metadata information about email addresses.

Here are some steps to take to manage and keep your email list in its healthiest, fittest shape possible.

Here's a fact: email addresses eventually atrophy or go bad over time, no matter how much monitoring or checking you do. Email users may either abandon an email account (until inbox becomes too full to receive any more message) or shut it down for good. This is why a "bounce" happens - an email that you attempted to send bounces back and remains undeliverable.

More bounces means more impact on your sender reputation, since most service providers believe that responsible email senders delete bad addresses from their lists on a regular basis. As it is, spammers usually have high bounce rates. Would you want to be associated with spam practice or have bounced or bad addresses regularly removed from your database?

It is suggested that you do not remove email addresses as soon as they bounce ounce, because, for example, what if it's just temporary technical failure on the part of the service provider? You may keep your email list clean by having a threshold of three to five bounces before removing it from your database. Track undeliverable addresses and make sure that they are removed from your email list, too.

Use a web-based email address checker: it has flags that provide detail beyond whether or not an email can get past a server. Through this, marketers like you get the kind of information they need to reduce bounce rates and improve open rates in their campaigns. To verify an email address also means protecting yourself against getting blacklisted by email messengers.

Many email marketers simply continue sending to their email lists even if many users have not opened a single email in months. You don't really lose money here, but this scenario impacts your sender reputation score as determined by email service providers. What can you do to address this problem and avoid landing in the spam box for a segment of low-activity email users?

You have to know what is considered "low activity" usage. An active user may be one who opens one email a month (if you send weekly newsletters) or someone who opens an email every three months (if you send monthly newsletters). There is really no metric that you can apply here, which means you should use your own judgment.

Query all of the email addresses that do not meet your ideal criteria for your email database and place them on a separate list. This isn't to ignore them; you just want to limit your frequency of emails to them. You should also identify those who may be looking at your email but not registering as an opened email due to images that don't load or those who are forever on a preview-pane view.

Email everyone on your low email usage list and inform them that you are doing regular email maintenance. Ask them if they are still interested to receive your mails (of course with a call-to-action to continue subscription), and if they are, provide a confirmation link or an email address where they can complete steps to return to your main email list.

All these may seem like a lot of work, but in the long run they will spell profound benefits to your direct marketing. If you are past the startup-business level, how about investing time and money on efficient tools like email validation and reaping long-term gains and savings?

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Pitch Offers And Deliver Content In Your Email Messages

You're building a list of email opt-in subscribers but those subscribers don't do you any good unless you broadcast emails out to them. When you do those broadcasts, there are basically two kinds of messages you can send. One's to promote an offer for people to buy and ones that don't. In other words, you can either pitch an offer or you can give away free content. How much pitch and how much content should you have in your emails?

It's very simple, just start with the content email and pitch at the end. That way, if someone is not interested in your offer but might be in the future, if someone has already taken you up on your offer and purchased, they can still get something out of that email, they just don't click on the link. Likewise, if they have not bought from you or they have not purchased this particular offer yet, they can read that same piece of content and understand why the pitch is important and click on it already pre-sold for what you are offering.

The only tricky part is transitioning from the free to the paid and many people get nervous and chicken out. But if you think of it instead of as content and pitch as why you need this into here it is, it becomes easier. If you're promoting a course on how to design a webpage, your content might explain the alternatives to making your own webpage. You can hire it out, you can buy an existing template and your content is listing all the alternatives or all the different ways to go about it. But then you should transition and say, "Here are all the bad ways to do it but the best way, the perfect way, my way is to buy this training course on how to design your own webpage. That way you pay one time, you can use it over and over again and the webpage comes out exactly the way you want it."

When it comes to email marketing, the thing you have to remember is that you're automatically better than most other email marketers because you are the one who sticks around. You are the one who sends them messages and follows up when everyone else forgets about it. Just by sending emails to your subscribers on a regular basis and building that relationship will increase your click through rate to the web pages and your conversion rate to those order buttons.

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How Often To Mail Your Email Subscriber List?

Many people put a lot of effort into having an opt-in page, making a list and getting traffic to that list so that you can gather new volunteer email subscribers who will then read your messages and click on whatever links you send in those messages. Obviously, you want to have fans and you want to have people on your list who will go to your latest blog post, your latest affiliate link, your latest forum post or you later sales letter but how often should you mail? How often is too much? Is it possible to not mail often enough?

You should email your list at least once a week if not every day. I know that asking you out of the gate to email your subscribers every single day is a lot to ask which is why once a week is a good place to start until you get used to sending short and to the point messages and you make it a daily habit or routine to contact these subscribers. It's okay to email your subscribers every single day because you're giving them good information which leads me to the next common issue of "Should I send content emails or should I send pitch emails? Should I share lots of free tips or should I give them links on what to buy?"

The answer is both, you just emails that are a blend of content and pitch. You share with them a tip and then you explain how they can use that tip by buying this course. You solve one of their problems and say, "Now that this problem has been solved, the next step is to click on this link and buy this thing." Your email is not 100% content but they are also not 100% pitch. Note that I said, not 100% content. That means that every one of your emails should lead to something.

You should have a call to action underneath this short message you're sending. A call to action is just "Here is what to do after you read the email." That might be, "Be on the lookout for my email tomorrow." It might be, "Click on this link and read and comment on my blog post." It might be, "Reply to this message," or it might be, "Click on this link, go to this webpage and buy." But make sure that your email messages don't just leave your subscribers hanging. There's a very clear step to take after they are finished reading.

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