Best practices for your email list marketing strategy
Hi everyone, I’m Jann Mirchandani from Westchester Marketing Cafe, where we cater to your online marketing needs.
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We’ve been getting a lot of calls lately with questions about our best practices for email marketing strategy. So I thought I would share some of those tips with you today.
The first thing you want to do is make sure that you’re using a service provider such as MailChimp or Constant Contact and there is a lot of others out there, but it’s really important to use an esp, an email service provider, so that your adhering to industry standards, best practices and CAN-SPAM laws. What that means is that you want to make sure that the people that your emailing want to hear from you, that they’ve given you permission to email them with your commercial and your marketing messages. That’s called an opt-in.
They also need to be able to opt-out when they don’t want to hear from you or if they don’t want to hear from you any longer. Perhaps you’re not a right for them anymore and they just aren’t interested in your messages. They also need to be able to opt out when your message no longer meets their needs. That’s part of the CAN-SPAM law and an email service provider is gonna allow to very easily manage those opt-ins and opt-outs.
The other thing you want to make sure that you are doing is scrubbing your list periodically. Meaning, the people who aren’t opening your messages anymore, who aren’t clicking through, you can sending them a segmented email, meaning you’re sending an email message just to those readers to see if they really aren’t interested in your message anymore or what you can do to engage those readers and if they are really not interested then go ahead and delete them. Delete emails that are bouncing, meaning either because the email address is full, the inbox is full, or for whatever reason you are getting a soft bounce, or if there is a hard bounce meaning the email actually isn’t going anywhere. It’s actually a faulty email address. Make sure that you’re deleting those from your list. What that will allow you to do is improve the results of your existing and your remaining subscribers, because your list is going to be considered cleaner and the email clients, Google, Gmail, and Outlook, they’re going to see that your list is really top notch, clean list, you’re not spamming, and they’re going to give you better results in terms of deliverability. So make sure you’re scrubbing your list periodically.
The other thing you want to do is when you’re taking a look at all of your subscribers get that into a single list. You want to avoid having multiple lists for different reasons. You want to have a single list that allows you to segment your subscribers based on the message that you’re sending. So that might look like you have a single master list, but you have email addresses of your subscribers identified by maybe the zip code, so that you can send a targeted list to people in a specific town. Perhaps you are doing a speaking engagement or you are going to be at a show somewhere and you want to invite them to meet you. You can send an email just to that list. Just to those subscribers. Perhaps you want to send to people on their anniversary or on their birthday and provide a special offer for them that way. You can send a segmented list just based on birthday or anniversary date. So if you have a single list with all of your subscribers included and all of the proper information in the proper fields, you can segment those lists and send really targeted messages so that you get better open rate and a better click rate and engage with your readers on a more meaningful level and give them information that is relevant for them.
So these are just some really basic tips to help you clean up your list, use proper protocol and proper best practices so that you remain a welcome addition to people’s inboxes when they’re going through their emails.
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