When it comes to e-mail campaigns, you’re only as good as your list. If you’re sending your e-mail to the wrong prospects, you’ll get nowhere. And, Internet service providers, spam monitors, and e-mail security services have set standards for what constitutes an acceptable e-mail campaign. So ongoing maintenance of your e-mail list is a must if you’re looking to engage the best prospects. You want your spam complaints, undelivered messages, and unsubscribes to each be under set thresholds to avoid account suspensions from your e-mail platform, penalties, fines, and otherwise lackluster marketing results. Use these four tips to get you going.
1. Invite Prospects to Opt-In
As you are building your e-mail list of hot prospects, it’s important that you ask them to connect with you via e-mail by opting in. A great place to do this is on your website. A small teaser add is usually sufficient with an option to submit their name and e-mail address. Ideally, once your prospect has opted in, it’s a good idea to send a follow-up confirmation e-mail where they can click on a link to start their subscription. This double opt-in process ensures you have a valid e-mail address.
2. Don’t be Afraid to Purge
In order to have the best e-mail list, you have to remove prospects that aren’t bringing anything to the table as well as clean up any errors. Look for the following issues on your list and fix or remove as appropriate.
- Incomplete e-mail addresses, bad addresses, dormant ones, or those with typos
- Duplicate e-mail addresses
- Two or more soft bounces
- E-mail to individuals and not generic addresses such as info@company.com
- Inactive subscribers or those who’ve been on your list for years
- Honor unsubscribes promptly
3. Ask to be Added to Address Books
Prospects who subscribe to your e-mails should be more than happy to add your e-mail address to their address book. But, they likely won’t do that unless you ask them to. The reason it’s a good idea to do this is because you want to make sure they receive all of your e-mails and that they don’t go in to junk mail.
4. Keep in Touch
A good rule of thumb is to e-mail at least once a month. This keeps your prospects engaged, but it also enables you to clean up your list by seeing how many bouncebacks you get.
How do you clean your e-mail list so you’re reaching the best prospects? Share your ideas with us.
Digital Media Insider 