9 Best Practices for Email List Management

For some companies, email marketing can become one of the most profitable marketing channels. Are you wondering why it is not yet the case for you?

It might be that you have grown a huge list that is too costly to maintain and while more subscribers are becoming less active, decreasing your ROI, you might be wondering what you are doing wrong.

You can also end up in a situation when you have limited resources to grow your email list and need some ideas to make the most use of what you already have. No matter what size your list is, in this article, you will learn about the email list management tips that will make email marketing work like a dream.

What is email list management?

Email list management involves segmenting your list, assigning tags to subscribers, setting triggers, and tailoring communication to send more personal and targeted emails. A successful email list management helps you reach customers at the right moment and place – when your audience is ready to engage with your content. So why should you really care about this aspect of email marketing?

Benefits of a Healthy Email List

Maintaining a healthy email list is a good practice that will help you achieve your email marketing KPIs. Here is how improving email list management will support you in squeezing more ROI from each dollar spent on marketing automation.

• Higher inbox placement rate (IPR), the percentage of email delivered to the mailbox instead of spam or other folders, will help reach more subscribers and encourage them to take action.
• Lower email marketing costs as you won’t have to pay for the subscribers that never open your emails and won’t buy your products.
• Avoid spam traps and fake emails that are a threat for the companies that decide to take the risk of buying emails, not collecting sign-ups on their own.
• Higher email campaign efficiency is a positive by-product of keeping only active email addresses on the list from the people who have given their consent to receive marketing communication from your company.

9 Best Practices for Email List Management

The good news – it’s not that difficult to keep your list healthy if you introduce these nine simple practices for email list management. Let’s have a sneak peek!

1. Send a personalized welcome email

Once your subscriber’s email address lands on your list, trigger a welcome message and start building relationships that lead to the first purchase.

Learn how Casper is using a welcome email to build trust with new subscribers. The fact that the whole R&D team is working on creating a perfect formula for sleep makes an impression, not mentioning that Casper is the top-rated brand in this niche.

When designing your email, mention the reasons why your subscribers would love your products. For example, you could write about how you stand out from the competition.

Also, don’t forget to bridge the gap between pure informational content and an introduction to what your business is doing. Don’t waste the chance to drive your subscribers to your online store, your product gallery, or even to start a conversation with your sales representative. They might not finalize a purchase just yet, but you will establish a valuable touchpoint that will result in a purchase at some point in the future.

2. Let subscribers adjust email preferences

Subscribers can have different preferences regarding the type of emails, the frequency with which they receive them, and the time when they like spending a few minutes reading your updates. Let your audience adjust their email preferences in case you have got it wrong from the beginning. To understand how email preferences work, let’s check some examples.

Here is how Grammarly helps their email subscribers update email preferences. Each of the email lists contains a brief description of the benefits a subscriber can lose by opting out from the list. A subscriber is redirected to this page upon clicking the update email preferences link.

Think of how you can describe the value of your lists and design the page where you can redirect your users once they decide to update their email preferences. For example, you can add a hyperlink email preferences page in the footer for each newsletter.

3. Use smart email triggers

Sending one email to the whole list of subscribers is a thing of the past. Such email campaigns lack personalization and context and, as a result, they don’t resonate with your subscribers’ needs and desires.

Instead of using a one-size-fits-all solution, trigger specific emails depending on the actions users take on your webpage, how they interact with your product, or how long they have been inactive.

Here are just a few examples of email triggers that you can use:

• Audience segments – create audiences based on multiple criteria such as gender, geographic location, or transaction status. Trigger your email once a subscriber is added to a specific audience list.
• Date-based – trigger your emails based on the date derived from your subscriber’s contact information such as birthday or anniversary.
• Link click – this is a powerful trigger that can help you reach a subscriber with the right message at the time and when they are close to making a purchase. For example, you can send an email to the subscribers who visit your demo page.

There are a variety of emails you can trigger.

• Welcome emails to greet your subscribers upon signing up.
• Reactivation emails to engage the email subscribers that have been inactive for a while.
• Abandoned cart emails to deal with the users who haven’t finished a purchase.
• Transactional emails that come upon finalizing a payment such as order confirmation
• Birthday emails that you send on the special occasion and where you can include some birthday discounts.
• Survey emails that you would use to collect useful feedback and reviews about your products.

Let’s briefly check the example of survey emails. If you want to collect feedback about your products, you can send an NPS survey and trigger it within a day after product delivery. Check out how the NPS survey can be embedded in the email campaign content.

Also, remember that it’s never a bad idea to check email newsletter examples of your competitors or companies that have a smart marketing strategy to get some inspiration. It is worth signing up for their newsletters and checking the campaigns they are sending from time to time while saving the best templates.

4. Regularly clean up your email list

Cleaning your email list is a process of sifting through your email contacts and identifying fake email addresses, email addresses with typos, and non-existent email addresses.

Email list cleaning brings a lot of benefits such as improvement in click-through rate and open rate. This is because you no longer send email campaigns to the email addresses where they are never opened. So when is the right moment to clean your email lists?

Look at the following metrics to identify some red flags for your lists:

• higher bounce rate than the average for your campaigns
• low or decreasing open rate and click-through rate
• high unsubscribe rate

Use tools that will help identify and remove unwanted email contacts.

5. Always obtain permission to send emails

Permission-based email marketing is also known as opt-in email marketing and is required in order to receive explicit consent from a user before adding them on your email list. Signing up people on your list without them asking for it is a malicious practice.

Just imagine how many email contacts would blacklist your email address after they figure out they have never signed up. If a user marks your email as spam, their email notifies an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that the email looks suspicious and it can result in denylisting your campaign.

Spam filters are another threat to flagging your emails as dangerous. By sending emails that are marked as spam you can eventually end up in the situation of being banned from sending email campaigns in the future.

So is it worth a risk? Definitely, not! So what can you do to prevent such situations from happening?

To ensure your email list is healthy, never buy email lists and sign up contacts that haven’t given you permission.

6. Create re-engagement campaigns

There are some subscribers who have signed up at some point but stopped opening your emails and engaging with your content. Also, some of them could have bought something, but have never become returning customers. It doesn’t necessarily mean their email addresses are lost. They just need a special approach to how you communicate with them and, perhaps, a special incentive to feel valued.

Set up a trigger for subscriber inactivity – it can be 15, 30 days, or a different time frame you believe would make sense. After this time passes and a subscriber is still not back, send an email that would equip your subscribers with the right knowledge to keep going and explore your product.

Check out how it is done in this email campaign. In the end, a subscriber is given clear guidance on the next steps. It can’t be easier to get back and create the first infographic, right?

Once you plan for your re-engagement campaign, think of the right trigger. Also, brainstorm your communication. There are just too many boring emails out there! Yours shouldn’t be the boring one if you decide to be a bit more creative.

For instance, if your product was focused on helping people learn how to be a better writer, you may want to use an online course platform to create a free mini-course to help them understand important concepts they may not otherwise know.

This may seem like a lot of work, but if your re-engagement campaign works, it’ll further engage prospects who already know your brand which typically have a higher chance of converting.

7. Don’t make it difficult to unsubscribe

There is this idea of making it more difficult for users to perform the actions you don’t want them to take. This strategy is often practiced by subscription businesses where they ask a user to call them in order to cancel a paid subscription as they want to learn about the reason for canceling the account.

This strategy is also used in email marketing – some would hide the unsubscribe link from the email copy. While it might distract your subscribers from leaving your email list, some of them would be furious about this strategy. You can expect your campaign to be blacklisted, sent to spam, or criticized on social media.

Think about the benefits of adding an unsubscribe link to your email. Why should you keep an email subscriber who is not engaged and doesn’t find your work interesting? They would not open, read, and take action.

8. Segment your list

By splitting your master list into smaller segments, you can make your email campaigns more targeted and get them to resonate with your subscribers more. In fact, segmented emails receive a 94% open rate compared to 42% for non-segmented ones.

To give you an idea of how you can segment your list, here are some examples of email list segmentation:

• Demographic segmentation can include your contacts' age, gender, background, and occupation.

• Behavioral segmentation is based on how your subscribers have interacted with your business before. For example, you can segment your list based on the type of products your subscribers bought before or time of last purchase.

• Geographic segmentation can include the criteria such as city, state, or country.

• Psychographic segmentation implies using criteria such as personality, motivations, lifestyle, values, and interests. You can gather psychographic data with lead scoring quizzes, surveys or online tests.

As now you know how you can segment your list, it is time to see what segments you can create.

• By subscriber engagement – segment depending on how often your subscribers open and interact with your emails. For example, you can send a request for review or a survey to a contact that has recently finished purchase and some special offer email to an inactive subscriber to get him in the spending mode.

Check out what email this company is sending to the subscribers that haven’t started using their saving tool just yet. The email is supposed to engage subscribers by getting them to calculate how much savings they can generate for free.

• By time zone – creating this segment will be especially useful for agile businesses that have clients worldwide. Instead of sending your email to US clients at night when it is daytime in Europe, you can trigger your campaigns to be sent at the right time during the day on the other continent.
• By product interest – if some of your subscribers often browse sportswear, send some email with a special discount on similar products.
• By customer type – differentiate your communication depending on how long a subscriber has been on your list. For example, you can send a triggered email to customers belonging to the segments of new subscribers, first-time customers, returning customers, and more.
• By lead source – create segments based on how you acquired a subscriber and the material or message that made them sign up with you in the first place. For example, if you advertise your Starter Pack program on Facebook and get some subscribers to buy it, create a separate segment and send a campaign which would offer another killer offer. If you obtained the leads from a webinar you hosted, create a separate segment for them as well.

9. Switch email service providers (ESP)

If your ESP is not delivering the results you expect, it is limited in the functions you need badly or it gets too expensive, consider moving to a different service provider.

However, remember that your email deliverability and overall campaign efficiency can tank if you don’t take these precaution methods upon moving.

• Import your unsubscribe list to avoid the random mistake of sending an email to a subscriber who has already opted out from your lists before.

• Review soft and hard bounces and don’t send any emails to these addresses from your new ESP.

• Trim your list if necessary by analyzing the contacts that haven’t opened your emails for a while.

• Don’t send mass emails as your Internet service provider (ISP) can consider this activity as suspicious once your IP changes together with your ESP. Divide your list into smaller chunks and send campaigns gradually increasing email size.

  Level up your email list management

  Applying good practices of list management should become a must-do activity in your organization if you want to get more out of your investment in email marketing. We hope that this guide has helped you learn about the ways how you can improve this process and increase your email marketing ROI in the long run. Time to get down to work and put this knowledge into practice!