Manage Your Businesses E-mail Marketing Lists Like a Pro

Keeping a close eye on your e-mail marketing list and understanding how to manage this crucial data is an important first step towards a professional approach to e-mail marketing. Here are our top tips for managing your list like a pro:

Welcome your new subscribers

You should start as you mean to go on when attracting new subscribers to your e-mail marketing list, and a welcome email is a great best practice to implement. It works both as a means of ensuring your subscribers feel valued, but also ensuring they intended to subscribe in the first place. You could ask for confirmation via a dedicated link, and provide them with any opt-out information they might require or the contact details they need to get in touch if they encounter any problems. This will ensure your subsequent e-mails are only reaching people who truly want to see them – and helps to filter out lots of issues which could otherwise occur as you start to realise your e-mails are being unopened or ignored.

Allow easy routes to unsubscribe

Making it clear to your readers how to unsubscribe will prevent them from feeling bombarded. It might seem a little counterproductive, but by allowing this process to be as straightforward as subscribing was, you keep your e-mail list fresh and engaged.

Segment where necessary

Segmenting your e-mail marketing list in order to contact specific target audiences can be a great way to avoid irritating those on your wider list for whom the information provided isn’t of interest.

Remember to clean your list

It’s natural that over the course of a year, you’ll lose some of your subscribers. People change e-mail addresses, their interests alter – there are many reasons why this could be, but all of them lead to you sending e-mails to people who aren’t opening them. Regularly remove hard bounces from your list, and schedule in this maintenance so it becomes second nature rather than creeping up on you. Some e-mail marketers choose to clean their email list weekly, monthly or after significant campaigns – the timescales will be dependent upon the size of your list and the frequency of your e-mails.

Maintain a quality e-mail list

Every e-mail marketing list should follow the adage of quality over quantity. If your e-mails are not hitting the right target or yielding results, then it doesn’t much matter how many people are on it – a smaller audience who genuinely appreciate your content is always vastly superior to a huge list of un-engaged recipients who delete your e-mails immediately. Maintain your list well, and you should soon reap the rewards.