Ever thought of depreciating your email marketing list? If you haven’t, probably you should. It is no longer a good practice to send out messages to millions of recipients with the belief that your efforts will get appreciated. In fact, in most cases it might do more harm than good. Spam monitors, internet service providers, etc., all have threshold limits set for acceptable mailing campaigns.
Your spam complaints, undelivered and unsubscribed emails, all need to adhere to the limits specified. If you have not been paying much attention to mailing list clean up, you are probably at the risk of losing out on your precious efforts, and in turn business opportunities. Also, flagging of your email as spam can result in account suspension by your mailing service provider, fines and low Return on Investment (ROI).
It is true that even the best mailing list is prone to duplication of addresses, names, contact details, etc. Therefore, for any email marketing strategy to be effective and successful, proper cleaning up of mailing list is very important. Merge, purge and data hygiene are among the processes used to clean up mailing lists that help in identifying missing entries, de-duplicating, verifying and validating records, removing invalid addresses and a lot more.
Here are few tips that will help you build and manage a clean mailing list:
Work on data hygiene of your mailing list: Initiate with simple data check processes to correct typing or spelling mistakes encountered during the acquisition phase itself. This will eliminate basic errors and also help you avoid sending emails to invalid accounts. You can also remove distribution email addresses during this phase. These days numerous email marketing solution providers have mailing list hygiene tools built in with their services to help keep mailing list clean and also lower the bounce rate.
Keep a Tab on Bounce Rate: Email marketers face a lot of confusion due to undelivered emails, since their bounce codes are cryptic, and they also lack standardization. However, not mailing to undeliverable addresses is crucial for mailing list management, and also for increased Return on Investment (ROI). Decoding each and every bounce code is not required; you only have to oversee hard and soft bounces.
- Soft bounces basically are temporary delivery problems occurring from full inbox or server down issues. Resending emails to these addresses is considered fine because they have a chance of getting delivered in next few attempts.
- Hard bounce on the other hand is permanent delivery problem ensuing from invalid email address. Since, there is no possibility of the email getting delivered, it is imperative to immediately remove these addresses from mailing list. ISPs keep a track on the number of bounces you generate and your emails may get blocked if there are too many bounces.
Remove complainants: Apart from tracking number of bounces, ISPs also take into consideration the number of complaints that your emails generate. Even after following best practices and subscribers opting in, your email can still be marked as spam by subscribers. Hence, it is imperative that such complaint feedback loop is identified, and removed from mailing list immediately.
Delete Dormant Subscribers: It is prudent to delete inactive subscribers from mailing list to improve ROI, even though they might not have personally unsubscribed from your mailing list. Although, before removing them, re-engagement campaign can be launched to regain their interest. If nothing works out, send them a notification. If subscribers still do not react, remove them from your mailing list.
Success of an online campaign is not measured by the number of subscribers. It rather depends on the quality of subscribers, and how well they respond to your emails. These tips will definitely help you in managing your mailing lists, effectively. For cleaning your mailing lists, you can either buy or build software, or you may take the help of professionals providing mailing list clean up services.
A successful marketing campaign calls for a clean, accurate and up to date mailing list. SunTec India, offers a gamut of mailing list clean up services that are tailored to meet client specific business requirements. Outsourcing mailing list cleanup or mailing list compilation requirements to SunTec India can help organizations to target right audience base, maximize campaign results and increase Return on Investment (ROI).
So, what are you waiting for? Start preparing for your next marketing campaign, but always make sure to keep your mailing list updated and sparkling clean.
