Managing your Lists
Acquiring the email addresses for your lists is just half of the process. You must perform routine maintenance on your lists to be sure the addresses are accurate and up-to-date. Email marketing has the highest return on investment than any other marketing initiative, but if you deploy messages to invalid addresses, you’re not only decreasing your ROI, you’re damaging your reputation as well. Here are some tips and best practices for managing your lists:
List Hygiene: Performing a simple data check to correct any misspellings and typos entered during the acquisition phase is the first step towards clean lists. These tools will correct errors, such as tom@alo.com, tara@gmailcom, terry!yahoo.com, etc., so you don’t deploy messages to these invalid accounts. Listrak has a list hygiene feature you can use to clean your lists so your bounce rate remains low.
During this process you should also remove any distribution email addresses, such as sales@company.com, system email addresses, such as postmaster@company.com, and any email address with the word “spam” in it.
Bounce Management: Undelivered emails continue to cause a lot of confusion for email marketers as the bounce codes are cryptic and they lack standardization across the different email clients. However, this is one of the most critical steps of your list management process so you must take the time to understand the correct way to handle emails that bounce. You don’t have to decipher all of the bounce codes in order to perform this task – you just have to know the difference between hard and soft bounces.
A soft bounce is a temporary deliverability problem such as an inbox that is full or a server that is down. It is okay for you to resend the messages to these addresses because there is a good chance the message will go through on the second or third attempt. Listrak automates this process by allowing you to set the number of delivery attempts for soft bounces. The system will automatically resend the message until it is delivered or until it reaches the threshold, at which point it will remove the address from your list.
A hard bounce is a permanent deliverability problem such as an invalid email address. Because there is no chance the message will go through it is important to remove these addresses immediately. Listrak also automates this process by removing all hard bounces from your lists so you don’t continue to mail to the invalid addresses. ISPs track the number of bounces you generate with each send and use it when determining your reputation. If you generate too many bounces the ISPs will block your messages from being delivered. However, with a tool like Listrak that automates bounce management, your reputation remains intact and your deliverability remains high.
Feedback Loops: Another factor ISPs use to determine your reputation is the number of complaints your messages generate. Right now it is still easier for people to report your unwanted messages as spam than it is for them to unsubscribe from your lists. Even if you followed all of the acquisition best practices and the subscribers requested to receive emails from you, they can still report your messages as spam. It is imperative that you monitor feedback loops so you can identify complainers and immediately remove them from your lists. Listrak is pre-integrated with feedback loops and it automatically removes any subscribers who complain about your messages from your lists. However, if you are using an email marketing solution that does not include this feature, you can sign up for the different feedback loops and perform the task manually.
Remove Inactive Subscribers: The thought of proactively removing subscribers from your list that haven’t unsubscribed or complained about your messages might sound crazy to you. However, it is a current trend and best practice that savvy marketers are using to improve their ROIs by ensuring their lists contain only subscribers who are interested in receiving their information. After all, if someone is only going to delete your message, why should you even send it to them in the first place?
Before you remove subscribers from your lists you should send them a series of remarketing campaigns to try to reengage them. You can start with a contest or a special incentive to try to recapture their attention. If that doesn’t work, simply ask them if they wish to remain on your list and include an easy way for them to opt-out, or send a notification that their subscription period is ending and ask them to opt-in to your lists again. If these tactics don’t work and the subscribers remain inactive, remove them from your list. The success of an email marketing campaign is not measured by the amount of subscribers on a list, it is measured by the quality of the subscribers. And it’s better to deploy a message to 5,000 active and interested people than it is to blast the message to 10,000 people if half of them don’t care.
For more information on list management best practices, read Listrak’s white paper “Outlook for 2008: Essential Email Marketing Deliverability Guide.” This white paper includes additional tactics that will not only keep your lists clean, but will help keep your reputation intact and will increase your deliverability rate.