List Mangement

In order for you list to be useful you need to be able to manage it – this means segmentation.

Think Segmentation

Combining your different marketing lists allows for clear segmentation and ability to better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages. Once you have access to an integrated marketing system, keep your buyer persona in mind and focus on the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message

Improving Deliverability

Deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes versus the total number of messages sent. It tells you how many of the emails bounced back and if that number is high, it’s a sure sign of inactivity. There are soft bounces and hard bounces. The soft bounce is temporary and occurs when an email server rejects an incoming message. For instance, when your recipients’ inboxes are full. A hard bounce, on the other hand, is less benign and represents a permanent error to deliver an email. This generally occurs when the addresses you send to are bad or don’t exist.

Low deliverabilty rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). If your list is loaded with inactive emails, you don’t have a sense of your true complaint rate. While many marketers just look at total complaints over total list size, ISPs are actually looking at total complaints over number of active email users.

ISPs can also mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. This means that, even if you acquired emails in a legitimate manner, the abandoned addresses may have morphed into spam traps. Aside from all the ISP problems, low deliverability rate also means you are wasting money sending messages to nonexistent addresses.

Practice Good List Hygiene

Regular Maintenance

Clean up your email list by removing those addresses that are no longer engaged. You can identify these addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity.

More Strict Opt-In Process

If you have a really serious problem with deliverability, you might want to redefine your opt-in process to prevent invalid emails from getting on your list. Either ask people to enter their email twice or experiment with double opt-in.

Preference Center

Make sure your recipients have an opportunity to update their email addresses. Invite them to your preference center from every email you send. That might also help you with segmentation and achieving higher engagement overall.

Growing & Retaining Subscribers

To grow their email database, marketers sometimes purchase lists. This practice will surely get you into trouble: it might add invalid addresses to your list and thus pollute your entire database. Even if the addresses you acquired are valid, the new recipients will most likely not be interested in your content and either unsubscribe or not engage with your emails altogether. Both of these alternatives are undesirable.

To retain subscribers, a lot of companies send fewer emails, thinking that the communication frequency might in some way define engagement. Rarity of emails means they are more special, right? Wrong. Frequency of emailing doesn’t necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention.

Earn your email subscribers

Clear Value Proposition for Email Opt-in

Don’t purchase email lists, but earn your subscribers. Be clear to your target market about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.

Segment Lists to Match your Priorities

Are you concerned that you are emailing your subscribers too often? Give this thought a break and instead ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message. In order to retain your email subscribers, you’ll need to provide them with ongoing value that is targeted to their needs. Make sure you are segmenting based on knowledge you have about your recipients.

Optimize & Test

Don’t limit your email testing to subject lines. Embrace testing of various elements in your email marketing efforts to optimize email performance. For instance, you can do A/B testing of landing pages.

Achieving Measurable ROI

Achieving measurable ROI (return on investment) is another challenge that marketing professionals face in the land of email marketing. In other words, it’s difficult for them to connect the dots between the messages they send out to prospective customers and the moment when these subscribers get further engaged and turn into customers.

Interestingly enough, this problem is tightly connected to challenge number one – integrating email marketing with other data systems. When your marketing channels are not speaking to one another, it’s hard to identify how they affect conversions. For instance, you might see that your email blast got a 3.4% click-through rate (CTR), but can you also see if that communication contributed to generating new leads? What is more, do you see if it resulted in any new customers?

Close the Marketing Loop

The solution to achieving measurable ROI from your email marketing campaigns is to practice closed-loop marketing. Follow a contact from the point of visiting your website through getting further engaged (viewing other web pages, downloading resources, clicking on your emails) to her final conversion into a customer. Implementing closed-loop marketing empowers you to track leads from their initial channel through a first conversion all the way to becoming a customer. Such intelligence, in turn, enables you to identify your most powerful marketing channels and assign clear value to each of them. In this way, you will be able to measure the ROI not only of your emails, but also of your other efforts, which might include social media and blogging.