Email List Management Best Practices to Apply in Your Business

You already have an extensive mailing list and run advertising campaigns, but want to make sure that your email marketing will bring great results? Building a contact list is just the beginning of the work. There are some important good practices in managing an email list that you may want to adopt.

Why is the proper email list management important?

Good contact list management is essential. You can turn prospects into loyal customers more effectively by providing your users with useful resources and establishing a deeper relationship with them. However, it won't be possible if you don't take care of the high quality of your business contacts.

Here are the main benefits of good mailing list management:

• Improving the messages deliverability - no matter how hard you try to get data from the people interested in your brand, random contacts will also be present in your database. Efficient list management will allow you to delete the addresses of the recipients who most likely won't become your customers.
• Increasing the capability and saving money - email marketing software often requires the company to pay for the number of sent messages or the size of the database. Reduce the campaign costs by identifying bounce-generating addresses and excluding them from your mailing list.
• Caring for the positive image of the company - regardless of the recipient you encounter (your target customer or a person not interested in your services), you'll be able to show them respect by adjusting the number and content of the messages sent to their expectations.
• Making your campaign statistics reliable – it isn’t easy to assess the effectiveness of advertising campaigns if your messages are regularly sent also to incorrect or inactive addresses. By employing the right practices and tools, you'll be able to update your customers' data on an ongoing basis, as well as find and remove incorrect information from your email list.

Proper email marketing database management will allow you to increase the probability of the messages passing through the verification of anti-spam filters. Recipient segmentation will enable you to increase their engagement by sending them content and offers tailored to their interests. The chance that your brand will be promoted by satisfied customers will increase - one satisfied customer may generate more leads. Managing the email list and building it in an organic way will increase the effectiveness of your campaigns, so it's worth implementing good practices as soon as possible to ensure the high quality of the contacts database.

Data validation in the form

Above all, try to prevent problems instead of having to solve them. A mistake can happen to anyone typing in a hurry. Validation at the stage of subscribing to the newsletter via the form on the landing page will allow you to stop the user from accidentally or intentionally entering incorrect data. This action consists of checking whether all the fields of the form have been filled in correctly - i.e. whether the entered values have the correct form (e.g. for an email address or a telephone number). There are users who want to get access to interesting materials but don't want to provide their real email addresses. Validation allows you not only to collect only the useful contact details, but also to guarantee the high quality of any data you gather.

Confirmation messages after subscribing to the newsletter

Providing an email address in the form doesn't always mean that the recipient is interested in all the content you offer them. It may also happen that they have accidentally filled in or omitted certain fields or checkboxes. Sending an automatic confirmation message will make it easier for you to obtain the appropriate consents that they haven't previously selected or to specify the type of content they would like to receive.

Double opt-in supports the validation process, which isn't able to catch a non-existent email address, but only an incorrect format of the provided information. By choosing the double opt-in model, you can be sure that the user has provided a real email address and is interested in your content. The person who signed up for the newsletter will need to click on a link in order to confirm that they want to receive messages from your company. Thanks to this, you won't collect non-existent (generating so-called bounces) or unused addresses in the database. Using this solution requires additional activity from the user but at the same time you can let them know that you take their opinion and needs into account. It’s also worth planning to send another invitation to confirm the subscription, because many users may forget to click the link.

Recipient lists segmentation

Many companies have more than one type of the ideal customer. The potential recipients can be divided into groups according to their different characteristics, e.g. interests, preferences for the form in which they receive the knowledge, or frequency of receiving the messages. Having such information about the recipients of your campaigns will allow you to tag selected recipients and divide them into groups. Segmentation of your website's users will allow you to send advertising, promotional and substantive materials tailored to specific groups of recipients. You can do it with marketing automation tools. One of these is Mautic. This software gives the user many possibilities. It can track all the visitors of your web page. All you need to do is create additional information fields in the contacts section, and Mautic will complete them after some time by itself, analysing the activity of visitors. Then you can use the collected information to segment the people who visited your site. The more you learn about your potential customer, the easier it'll be for you to effectively divide users and write engaging content. However, bear in mind not to collect too much data in one form, as this may discourage the user from filling in the fields.

Monitoring the statistics and running a well-thought-out campaign

Staying up-to-date is essential for any type of marketing campaign. Many people who consent to receive messages from you may mark your messages as SPAM shortly afterwards. Therefore, it's worth not only thoroughly thinking over what you'll send them, but also observing how they react to your messages. Make sure that your content is engaging and tailored to the customer's preferences to limit the possibility of marking the information as SPAM.

You may obtain useful information about a customer by asking questions and analysing user activity. With the right email marketing tool, you can check your campaign's effectiveness by evaluating:

• open rate - this indicator tells you how many of the recipients who received the communication have opened the message,
• CTR - click through rate - the percentage ratio of the number of clicks on at least one link in your message to the number of messages delivered in the campaign,
• unsubscribe rate - thanks to this indicator, you'll know the percentage of recipients who unsubscribed from the list,
• bounce rate - with this metric, you can find out how many addresses on your list are incorrect or non-existent.

The option to unsubscribe from the database

Even the best campaign may end up with obtaining the data of the users who won't be interested in your offer or lose interest after some time (or even unsubscribe immediately after receiving the benefit in the form of a gift, discount code or free training course). The messages from you may quickly become irritating for this type of recipient. Then not only will they cease to be effective, but they'll also generate unnecessary costs and may negatively affect your company image.

Give the user the option to quickly and easily remove their data from your database. You can make it possible to unsubscribe from the newsletter by sending an email or clicking the link in the received message. Such a link should be at the bottom of every message sent as part of your email marketing campaign.

Summary

The correctness and high quality of the collected data increases the effectiveness of mailing campaigns. Thanks to the detailed information about the customer, you can also use the advantages of marketing automation – for example, more efficient monitoring of user activity. It'll be a good idea to use the potential of segmentation, which will allow you to divide your email database more effectively. The Mautic services also include personalisation of the content directed at a given person based on the analysis of their interests, purchases and behaviour, automatic creation of offers and advertisements, etc. This software can replace many other, less advanced tools.