Four Tips on Keeping Your Email Marketing List Fresh

Jul 17, 2014

Four Tips on Keeping Your Email Marketing List Fresh

While automated email lists can greatly enhance a business’ profile and keep your customer base up-to-date on upcoming specials or promotions, they can easily be abused if handled incorrectly.

Few things can cause the kind of havoc as an automated email marketing software tool in the hands of an overly ambitious marketing department. Your email marketing list should help grow your customer base, not cause former customers or clients to automatically click delete whenever they see your email in their inbox. If you constantly badger your list with emails and promotions, you eventually start to see your subscriber rate plummet.

Like most things that help your business grow, email marketing is a tool that when used correctly offers a number of outstanding benefits. But when overused or abused, can tarnish your business’ image. That’s why it’s important to be smart about how and when you use email marketing. Make sure you keep track of how often you send out messages and utilize the tools offered with the email marketing software you are using to track the response rate of your list.

To keep your email marketing list fresh and subscribers actively engaged, try using the following tips.

Keep Track of Data

Most software and email marketing platforms offer users the ability to track a significant amount of data. How often your emails are opened, what the click-through rate of any internal links included in the message are and most any other type of user interaction is typically just a few clicks away.

This type of data offers a great snapshot of how successful your email campaign is at engaging your subscribers.

Determining early whether your subscribers have any interest in the content you’re sending them or whether the call-to-action found in the content of the message is leading them to click-through can help you alter or correct any campaigns that struggle or reinforce and expand on those doing well.

The data offered by your software of platform will quickly let you know whether your current approach is working or if you need to tweak your message to widen its appeal. If you suffer from low open rates, try experimenting with a different subject line. If you have a low click-through rate or call-to-action, try changing up your email copy.

You may also need to experiment with what time your emails are going out and how frequently. Once your emails start to enjoy a solid engagement and open rate, you’ll know that the frequency and times of your email delivery syncs up well with your audience. However, you won’t know any of these vital details unless you start closely monitoring and tracking your data.

Separate by Activity

The majority of software designed for email marketing allows you to see the level of engagement each subscriber has with your content. MailChimp, for example, gives each subscriber a star rating that reflects how engaged they are with your content. This is a wonderful tool for better understanding how responsive your subscribers are with your mailings. Once you get a handle on who’s engaged and who’s not, you can begin to break your subscribers into different groups.

Grouping subscribers based on activity allows you to market to each group individually. Subscribers that are more engaged and open every email you send out will respond better to more aggressive offers, while you can pull back on how aggressive you are to subscribers that have yet to become fully engaged with your brand.

Test with Frequency

Once you breakdown the response rate of email subscribers, you’ll begin to see how differently many people on your list respond to how frequently they are emailed. Some on your list with interact with everything that hits their inbox, even if something shows up once a week. Others will respond more favorably if contacted just once a month.

Fortunately, you don’t need to apply your best guess to determine how often you should send out emails. By conducting a split-test of several frequencies of mailings and collecting that data, you can begin to fine-tune your approach. While it’s possible you may lose a few individuals from your list early on in the process, ascertaining the best possible formula for your target market is so important to your business’ long-term success it’s a sacrifice worth making.

Build, Build, Build

You should always be looking for ways to continue building your email subscriber list, and testing different means of online marketing that allow you to increase your list. Search-engine optimization, social media marketing and paid search marketing can all help increase traffic to your landing page and email subscriber forms.

In order for your automated email marketing list to continue producing revenue, you need to constantly add fresh subscribers. Once you stop adding new subscribers, you run the risk of your list becoming stale and unresponsive. At a certain point, every lead that enters your email-marketing funnel will either unsubscribe, generate revenue or transform into a dead lead.

While the use of automated software to manage your email list is important part of any online marketing campaign, you still need to use the software correctly. You don’t want to overdo your efforts and destroy your list.

Keep building your list while collecting data to adjust your campaign, and you’ll decrease your unsubscribe rate and increase the number of conversions in the end.

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