5 Smart Ways to Maintain an Efficient Email List

Right from the beginning of Digital marketing sphere, Emails have been used on a massive scale to get a point across vast multitudes of users. It remains as important as ever when it comes to Business to Customers A.K.A B2C marketing. When you send out an Email in bulk make sure your mailing list is properly sorted out because a good mailing list gets you higher conversion rates. Additionally, no one wants to be bothered by unwanted spams which can eventually be very damaging to your business.

After creating an exhaustive database of accounts to broadcast your mails, your task is still far from over. You need to maintain the mailing list so that your subscribers don’t get pushed and embrace your mails voluntarily.

Here we are listing some smart ways which can help you build an efficient mailing list, with finesse:

  1. ALWAYS ask users to opt-in:

If you are maintaining a subscriber’s list, always generate data from the form filled by the user. An opted-in mailing list always boasts of very high engagement and click rates. Do not mix the data of voluntary subscribers to a bulk broadcasted mailing list. Spam mails which get delivered from your Email ID to the dedicated subscribers of your mailing list can bring such bad name to your business that apart from an obvious unsubscribe from the user you may be marked down as an official “spammer” by your service provider.

  1. Clear Out Inactive Subscribers:

Weeding out inactive subscribers can be really tiring and painful. You need to review the reports of your mailing list to check how healthy the numbers actually are. Every email service provider have data of number of “opens” and “clicks”. You must fix a timeline (a long range timeline viz. 6 months) and go through this list to remove the accounts who lie dormant. Remember, the quality of list is more important than its quantity.

  1. DO NOT save redundant or duplicate data of subscribers:

Redundant data results in delivery of copies of Email to a single account many number of times. This again puts your business at risk of being labelled a spammer. Apart from the loss of business it also makes handling of your work more tedious because of a need to maintain number of lists containing the same Email IDs. A common list can also aide subscribers to update information at one place and replicate the results at other places.

  1. Remove Fake or Spam Accounts:

Again, the quality of your list dominates over its size. A list of Email IDs that do not even engage with your email is as good as junk. The right people targeted in a careful manner are going to read your Emails anyway. They might even click on the links and turn into customers. But the problem is that most mailing lists are full of phantom or Spam accounts. Here’s a simple way to weed out such useless accounts- Look for email addresses that look like “sales@abc.com”. These are known as custom domain addresses and chances are that you are never going to get a response from them. It’s better to let go of these random company guys.

  1. Monitor Bounce Rates:

Bouncing of delivered emails is another very common issue faced by most marketing campaigns. Every email service provider provides you with the basic data about the bounced Emails. Bounced Emails are the Emails that are successfully sent from your end but does not get delivered to the subscriber. A high bounce rate can blow up the return of your investment on the campaign. You must investigate the reason of Bounce. It may be a result of spam account or a “damaged” email address. Sometimes it may be a server issue and you can try to resend the mail at a later time. If the problem still persists, you must right away delete the account from the mailing list. It is prudent to note that a high bounce rate can get you marked as a SPAMMER.

5.5. Rename accounts with common spelling error:

This is an additional Smart tip you can employ for a maintaining a better mailing list.

Your list must probably have some Email IDs spelled incorrectly. Sometimes user might have intention of joining the mailing list but simply made an error in hurry. It is very common to find accounts with “Gmail”, “Yahoo” or similar mistakes. We advise you to edit the names of these accounts MANUALLY to curb out bounce rates and optimize your mailing list.

Mailing lists have been a benchmark in Digital Marketing. It makes sure that your product reaches the audience directly. Your Email List must be maintained with finesse in order to reach a good quality consumer base and using the above mentioned smart ways, you would not need to complain. At all.

kathayat

Birbahadur Singh Kathayat is an entrepreneur and online marketing consultant. He is founder of the online marketing company LBSWebsoft. He has 10 years of work experience in digital marketing and helping small business. He advises several startups and established companies in India and other countries. You can follow him online at Google+ or @bskathayat.

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