How To Ensure Email List Success

As a professional email marketer, you want to use the power of email to build your business and remain connected with customers. That's a no brainier. However, to do it, you need list integrity and effective campaigns. A great strategy for this is cultivating a healthy email list. Once you understand and implement the "way to clean," there's no stopping you!

Time passes, people change their email addresses and don't tell you, emails bounce back, and non-responders pile up. If you're not careful, ISPs may see this as abuse... and flag you a spammer. Let's face it, a bad email list is scary. If left unchecked, the fallout can reflect negatively on your brand and harm your company. How can you ensure the integrity of one of your most important assets, your email marketing program? Try these strategies.

Is Your List Clean or Messy?

Clean lists are invaluable, they possess big opportunities for wealth and success. That's why it's so necessary to clean them on a regular basis. The cleaner they stay, the better they perform. Old names, unconfirmed addresses, and questionable sources may wreak havoc on your email marketing program. Ensure that this doesn't happen to your business!

If your list does get messy over time, you must recognize the symptoms. Here are a few common indicators:

1. Poor delivery rates
If successful deliveries regularly fall below 85%, your list smacks of mucky muck. It's probably time to open the hood and perform a tune up.

2. ISPs flag you.
Low deliveries go hand in hand with higher bounce numbers-and eventually ISPs will detect and label this as unsavory behavior and flag you. These flags jeopardize your ability to attain and maintain whitelist status.

3. Marked As Spam
Of course you don't intend to spam, but dirty lists actually are breeding grounds for spam traps. Without proper bounce management your old outdated lists may contain invalid addresses, which ISPs can covertly reassign as spam traps. Be wary of this-it could cost you.

4. You become a 'marked domain.
Sans Whitelist status, ISPs may simply shun your domain.

Clearly, a dirty email list can hurt your whole business, profit, productivity and public relations. The secret to being clean and staying clean involves both prevention and plucking.

Steer Clear of Poor Sources

Ensure cleanliness by carefully controlling address origins. Firstly, the best place for new subscribers is always your own customer list. To build a sparkling clean list here, get opt-ins from all customers and let them know how you intend to use their information through your privacy policy. Send "Welcome" messages to solidify the opt-in process. This tip also helps to develop brand awareness, set expectations for future marketing communication, and build trust with new subscribers; it is a critical, foundational step in your email program.
If you use paid acquisition tactics, please make sure that you are using permission based sources.

Proactively Deactivate

Ridding your list of deadwood is another important strategy to keeping fit. Over time, list quality and currency atrophy. If the stalemates stay, your bounce rates will likely increase and your key response metrics will deteriorate. Spam traps made of outdated names may hook onto your domain alerting ISPs. And trust us, negative attention from ISPs is not what you want.
That's why cutting underperforming or nonperforming names is of such grave importance. Commonly referred to as "Proactive Deactivation," it could save your list's vitality! Think of it as feng shui for your domain, restoring order, clearing cobwebs and making room for new energy.

Once or twice monthly identify lame, poor performing email addresses, bounces from undeliverable addresses and hard bounces indicating abuse/spam complaints.

Double Opt-ins

As you craft your list, consider using double opt-in permissions. With these important opt-ins filling up your database, delivery rates will go up. Single opt-ins may result in lower response and could prevent whitelist approval if your abuse complaints are high.

Doubling your opt-in permissions enables you to send cleaner and higher percentage deliveries, enjoy bigger lifetime list cycles, earn greater respect from ISPs, steer clear of spam traps, abuse flags and bounce backs and easily earn and preserve whitelisting.

Whitelisting

A sure way to increase your list's success is to establish and maintain whitelist status. This is granted to domains by ISPs 10-30 days after an email campaign initiates. Whitelisting assures credibility with ISPs and helps you sneak past the most advanced spam blockers. If your list has the right stuff, double opt-ins, bounce rates below 10%, and low abuse or spam reportages, you've got it made.