Mailing List Management

Mailing list management is a quite easy procedure if email marketer knows some simple rules to organize the process. Email marketing list is a vital source for accomplishing an email marketing campaign. To get impressive results on it you have to pay enough attention not only on collecting email addresses for your email marketing list, but also consider permanent checking and updating the data from it.

Sometimes it happens that an email marketer is in need of “fresh” emails to send newsletters. There is a simple way to get those addresses. Try to promote your list with a downloadable whitepaper or e-book. But don’t hurry up and give visitor the possibility to download the content before the opt-in option is performed. Allow content download only after the new subscriber confirms his/her email address and request. After the list reaches the needed volume it requires quite wise management.

Determining optimal send time

There are several simple actions you may undertake to get a better feedback of your mailing due to sending the newsletters in time. You can start work out on it from the very beginning, considering the opt-in form a start point. Let people select the time they prefer to get your email messages. One more way to optimize your email list is segmentation based on time zone, so that your subscribers from different time zones could read you messages in proper time. In most cases the opt-in form presupposes subscriber to indicate the zip-code, which could be used as determiner of the exact time zone. You also is able to manage a special survey to ask subscribers what time they are mostly willing to receive your mailings. Or it is also possible to organize a small focus group research. After the information about time zones is collected you can start to segment your list to make your emailing more comfortable for subscribers.

Shared email addresses

It often may happen the subscriber will give you a shared email address. That means he/she is not the only user of such email address. Thus another user can delete your message by mistake or considering it spam mailing. To deal with this problem try to get as much in formation on subscriber as possible, so that later you will be able to remind your subscriber about when, where and how he/she signed up. It is better to report this information immediately in a confirmation email. After the personal contact with the new subscriber is reached, include the information on subscriber in your email marketing list: you will later be able to use this data to target your email marketing campaign.

Email list fatigue

The term “list fatigue” means that in your email marketing list there are some inactive subscribers. They do not consider unsubscribing yet, but they also don’t open your email messages and are not engaged with them anymore. The list fatigue is calculated by determining the percentage of inactive subscribers. Calculating it, you have to find out what exact time period should be determined. After the needed calculations are done, try to re-activate those inactive subscribers.

Email list churn

List churn is the volume of subscribers that unsubscribe over a certain period of time (usually measured monthly or annually). To follow the monthly loss rate can be determined by monitoring your email performance reports. List churn includes hard bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints. To minimize churn from bad addresses consider permanent list hygiene and email address changes. Give your subscribers the possibility to re-subscribe if they have changed the email address, due to requiring optional email address to be filled in while signing-in.

Unsubscribe confirmation

Finally if you subscriber decides to unsubscribe and he/she fails, never consider sending them a negative reply as “Your request to unsubscribe was unsuccessful”, thus making people angry. It is better to confirm the unsubscribe request with the phrase like “Successfully unsubscribed”. In this case you will not harm you reputation.

Sunday, September 5th, 2010 : Email Marketing, Mailing List : No Comments