What You Need to Know About Email List Management

Email marketing is still at the top of its game when it comes to ROI. But did you know that the root of email marketing is your list management?

Although you may have a large list of potential clients, you need to nurture and cherish this list before sending out any campaigns. Think of your list as a pet fish, you must feed it, clean its water, and make sure it has all the necessary things to keep it healthy and alive. Much like your email marketing list, you need to keep it happy and healthy as well.

Your Complete Guide Of List Management

Your email marketing efforts are one of the most effective ways to convert recipients into clients, and even after to make them loyal clients who recommend your product or service. But sometimes, our email marketing falls into a slump, and it may not be for the reason you suspect.

Your email content is a vital part of your campaigns, but if you are seeing your efforts fall short, you may have to take a closer look at your email list. A fun, and surprising fact, is that your email marketing databases naturally degrade by 22.5% every year. This makes your list management a crucial element of a successful email marketing campaign.

Additionally, a shocking 40% of B2B marketers say that email marketing is a key element for revenue generation. Take note, because there is a big difference between the other 60% of them who aren’t taking advantage of email marketing.

So, have a leg up against your competition and take it one step further, and have proper list management to beat out the 40% who do care about email marketing.

Let’s get down to business. We first need to define, what is email list management?

Email list management is a collection of activities that are used to gain information about your subscribers. Building out a system-wide strategy around email lists helps businesses understand their customers better, maintain a clean list, ensure email viability, and avoid the dreaded high churn rates. Remember, when you start analyzing your email list and these key elements help you personalize your email campaigns even more.

When you personalize your email campaigns, your open rates will be astonishing.

• According to GetResponse, when you personalize the content of your email body it then has an open rate of 29.95% and a click-through rate of 5.03%.
• Meanwhile, Epsilon research found that** 80% **of customers are more likely to make a purchase when their experience is personalized.
• Without any personalization of your email marketing campaigns, it may cost an organization up to $2.5 trillion, according to Accenture.

When you are thinking about list management, you also have to think about the great outcomes that come with it. It’s not just a clean email list, but a number of benefits. This leads me to my next point…

Why Do You Need List Management?

If you think about it, your email list has the potential to make a great amount of money. So it only makes sense to protect the assets that make you more money, AKA your email marketing list.

There is no good in having a list of thousands and thousands of subscribers if more than half of them don’t even open your campaigns or send you straight to the spam folder.

The aim of email list management is to help you reach the results that you want from your email marketing campaigns. By managing your list it ensures that you are spending your valuable time and resources on subscribers that actually want to receive your emails.

The biggest risk of not utilizing email list management from the beginning is that your business IP address might end up on an email blacklist.

An email blacklist is a real-time database that is constantly being updated with IP addresses that are considered spam. It is a filter that determines whether or not an email will make it to an inbox or it will ultimately never deliver your emails.

So when you are on an email blacklist, it may be difficult to get off of it. You need to figure out what caused you to end up on this blacklist, and contact the spam list that blacklisted you to tell them that the problem has been remedied. The best practice to get off an email blacklist is to play by their rules and follow the proper guidelines to ensure your IP address gets removed from the list.

When you have a healthy email list, you are able to do so much for your campaigns. A healthy list unlocks many possibilities to ensure that you are trying to receive the best possible ROI.

A Healthy List Has 5 Key Elements

1. Good, and reliable, deliverability rates. According to Omnisend, a 95% delivery rate or higher.
2. Frequent new subscribers, remember that you still need to ensure that these emails are valid and free of errors.
3. Solid open rates, CampaignMonitor says anything between 15-20% is average.
4. Low bounce rates, meaning under 3% stated by Omnisend
5. Subscribers that have actively opted-in to receive your newsletters or updates.

Proper List Management

Proper list management has several factors that help improve your deliverability, relevance, and likelihood of converting recipients into customers. So, here’s what you have to know:

Step 1: Address the Email List Source

The first thought you should have when acquiring a new email for your list is to understand where the email was first captured. By knowing where your email came from and how it ended up on your list, it can help you avoid a big headache in the future.

If your email came from an existing customer base:

The customers that have used or purchased your product or service before are more likely to do so again, making them the most valuable in your email marketing list. They should be nurtured and handled with care so much so, that you are able to send more personalized and individualized emails to them.

If they are recently acquired leads:

These leads can come in from a combination of channels such as a company blog subscription, newsletter, sponsored advertising, direct response advertising from inbound marketing efforts, non-direct responses from people searching for your product or service, as well as non-converted direct responses from those who may have pain points in the industry that your product or service might help to solve.

The best way to handle these types of leads is to make sure that once they are on your list, is that they are clean and are not spam trap emails. With your email list management software, you should always have the ability to clean your list and also list cleaning automation. This will ensure that the email you have gathered is a reliable one.

Step 2: Ensure Proper Segmentation

Not every email campaign is created the same. Once you have acquired a substantial subscriber list, not every email is going to want to receive the same information. It is important to identify and segment the specific personas within your list. This will dictate how your business interacts and speaks with each customer and define what they are offered.

One example may be that you are approaching those who are more interested in the experience of using your product or service, and how it can solve the pain points of the industry. You will map out how it will help them achieve their goals.

But you may take a different approach with those who are in a more decision-making position and are more interested in the revenue gains through the adoption of your product or service in their business.

However, you may be targeting those who are stakeholders in the purchasing decision process, such as IT professionals or operations. While they may not use your product or service directly, they still have a role in the adoption of your solution within their organization.

Step 3: Utilize Checks and Balances

To successfully segment your list, you should introduce the proper checks and balances within your system. This will help make sure that you have all the necessary information before sending out any email marketing campaigns.

Along with the routine email quality assurance, you should always incorporate regular email health checks by cleaning your lists and auditing your database. This will help guarantee that you are avoiding any potential threat to your email campaigns and will help you get the best ROI.

Define Your KPIs

Your email marketing efforts become basically null and void if you are not measuring their results. You will never have a proper benchmark to see how you are performing. So when you are conducting your email marketing campaigns keep in mind these KPI’s while managing your email lists:

Open Rate

To calculate your open rate, you must divide the number of opens by the number of emails delivered and then multiply the number by 100 to get the percentage. To get an overall benchmark, in 2020 the average open rate was 18% across all industries.

(Number of Opens / Number of Emails Delivered) * 100 = Open Rate

Click-Through Rate

This is the number of people who clicked the link in your email, divided by the total number of opens and multiplied by 100, this will give you the percentage. Last year the average click-through rate was 2.6% across all industries.

(Number of Recipients Who Clicked on Email Link / Total Number of Opens) * 100 = Click-Through Rate

Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of emails that never actually made it into an inbox due to some unforeseen issue. It is calculated by dividing the number of failed email deliveries by the number of emails sent.

This is usually displayed by your email service provider once a list has been sent and will indicate the quality of your list. A high bounce rate indicates that you need to clean your list to remove invalid addresses, while a low bounce rate signifies that you have a high-quality list.

(Number of failed deliveries / Emails Sent) = Bounce Rate

Unsubscribe Rate

This number indicates those who have received your email, but no longer want to. They are those who opt out of your email list. This number is calculated by taking the number of contacts who unsubscribe divided by the number of emails delivered and then multiplying by 100.

Your unsubscribe rate is also displayed by your email service provider. In 2020, the average unsubscribe rate was 0.1% for all industries.

(Contacts who unsubscribe / Number of emails delivered) * 100 = Unsubscribe Rate

Some Benefits of Email List Management

When your email list is smaller than 100 recipients, you typically can manage them by hand and a simple spreadsheet will do the trick. But you still need to go through that list at least once a week to make sure those emails are still valid and without errors.

As your list continues to grow and more subscribers are added, automatic upkeep of your list is crucial. A software solution will become your most used and trusted product instead of a nice-to-have feature. Manually segmenting and cleaning a list will take a lot of time. Instead, focus your efforts on sending curated emails that are tailored to your recipient’s needs.

Your list email management system will help in not just one, but many ways for your email marketing campaigns

1. Personalization: With email list management, you are able to better segment and personalize your email lists based on numerous factors. You can segment based on location, stage in the buying process, or gender. This all stems from having great email list management.
2. Automation: When you use email list management, you can automate your campaigns by setting up different triggers of when to send an email to a consumer. Such as a welcome email for those who have recently signed up, or a password reset email with a link and instructions. Although these emails might seem quite basic, a little goes a long way with your customers. And it makes it easier for you in the long run.
3. Reporting & Analysis: You are able to track and analyze your user’s behaviors when you start to see your list management. You will be able to see right where you stand in your subscriber’s eyes (well, their inboxes) based on bounce rates, sender reputation score, click-through rates, open rates, etc… You are also able to better protect your IP address from ending up on a blacklist by monitoring your open rates, bounce rates and by avoiding spam traps.

Your email list management is no joke. We know that email marketing campaigns remain the most effective and efficient way to reach your target audiences, so you need to make sure your list management is also on point.

Emailable, the software solution that takes away any headache or stress of list management will help you take your email marketing campaigns to the next level. It is the most cost-effective email checker to reach your audience.

By setting up good practices for how you source, clean, and manage your email lists is a key factor in determining the success of your campaigns. Take your ROI to the next level when using the best email verification software solution.