We hear a lot of talk in the online world about the importance of growing your email list. Your email list tends to be the core of your business online. Although this is true, I recently wrote a blog post about Why You Shouldn’t Build an Email List. If you missed that post, be sure to check it out.
The main point of the post was to suggest that BEFORE you build your list, you should have an Email Marketing Plan because it’s important to know how you want to support the people on your list, and how you plan to monetize your list. Without knowing these two key points ahead of time, then building a massive list is pointless!
Once you have a plan and you’ve built a good sized list (over 1,000), the next step is to maintain your list. Especially nowadays, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) (i.e. Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc.) are looking at the response rate of the emails that you are sending out to determine whether your email is worthy of the inbox.
Here are four things you can do to spring clean your email list:
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Remove all Hard Bounce Emails from your list.
A Hard Bounce email is an email that was returned because the email address is not valid, or is no longer in use. Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) (i.e. MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber, GetResponse, etc.) automatically do not send emails out to email addresses on your lists that have hard bounced. However, it’s a good idea to go ahead and remove the email address from the list and/or double check your hard bounce list to see if there is a typo in the email address that caused the bounce, which could easily be fixed.
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Review Your Soft Bounce Email list.
A soft bounce usually occurs if the person receiving your email has a full inbox or some other issue has caused the person’s inbox to be temporarily unavailable. Because it is a soft bounce, most ESPs will continue to send future emails to this email address. However, it doesn’t hurt to review the list to see why some of the emails in your email list are soft bouncing.
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Separate Your Engaged Subscribers from your Unengaged subscribers.
Go back approximately 6 months and pull a report for any person on your list who has not opened your emails in the last 6 months. Create a separate list for these individuals. Separating your list this way ensures that the individuals who are left on your list are engaged with your brand and you have a higher chance of these individuals purchasing your products or services.
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Create an email series for the individuals on your unengaged list.
For those who have not opened your emails in 6 months create a three to four email series to try to reengage these individuals with your company. Offer special promotions, get feedback, do whatever you can in your email series to get these individuals reengaged with your emails.
This is just four ways you can spring clean your email lists. Once you spring clean your email lists you have a better chance of having higher open rates and getting better results from your email marketing.
Are you currently using email marketing in your business? Do you have an email marketing plan? If you need assistance creating an successful email marketing plan, contact us to schedule your FREE Email Marketing Success Strategy Session.