Maintaining a Healthy Email List : 9 Tips to become a Pro
If you are serious about growing and engaging with your Subscribers, maintaining hygiene in your Email lists is very important.
After all the trouble you took to get subscribers, you may think everyone on your list is reading and engaging with your content.
But in reality, did you know that every year 30% of your Email Subscribers churn out? This number is not just limited to those who choose the Unsubscribe option. You could be having a lot of stale email addresses in your account and emailing them without realizing it.
While there are ways to reduce Blog Unsubscribes, it is also essential that you have a healthy email list. This will help you gauge how many of your Subscribers are actually engaging with you on a regular basis and how good your content is.
Here is a list of 9 Effective strategies followed by leading Email Marketers, Bloggers and Influencers to build and maintain a healthy email list.
1. Use Double Opt-in Forms
If there is one tip out of these tips that is a must follow for a healthy email list, this is the one.
This is not a direct hygiene tip. But it has the most influence in helping you have a clean email list.
With Double opt-in forms, a person who wants to subscribe to your blog has to confirm twice. The first time is when he fills up his email address in the Form on your website. The second time is when he clicks on a link sent to his email address confirming his subscription.
Double opt-ins can help you identify that the person who entered her email address is actually interested in receiving your content. Also, it can help you reduce spam complaints by a huge margin and avoid your domain getting blacklisted by Internet Service Providers.
You may lose some genuine subscribers in the process because they were lazy to confirm on email but it is still better than having a set of single opt-in junk email addresses that can turn out to be spam traps.
2. Check regularly for Bounces
A bounce is when your email can’t be delivered to the Subscriber’s inbox. As a result, you will receive an automatic message in your inbox with the reason for failure in delivery.
There are two types of Bounces — Hard bounces and Soft Bounces.
Hard Bounces
When an Email cannot be delivered to an inbox permanently, it is called a Hard Bounce.
This could happen if the recipient’s email address or domain name does not exist. In some cases, the recipient server may have completely blocked delivery.
Review and remove hard bounces as and when they appear so that your Sender reputation remains intact.
Soft Bounces
A Soft Bounce is when the email reaches the recipient’s server but not his inbox due to temporary reasons.
It maybe because the user’s inbox was already full or the mail size was too large for the inbox or the server is temporarily down.
If it’s a soft bounce, check how many times a single email address has bounced. If it has bounced more than five times, then remove it from your mailing list.
There are tools like Neverbounce where you can upload your list and they will check and return the email addresses that will bounce. You can remove those and improve your deliverability.
You may think that this tip is redundant if you use a double opt-in form because in that case you get only verified email addresses. But sometimes your recipients may change to a new email address, start a new job and may have given the email address from old job while subscribing or may have simply stopped using the old account. So it is better to clean your mailing list once in 3 months.
This leads to the next important tip.
3. Run frequent Campaigns for your Subscribers
Stay in regular touch with your Mailing list recipients. If you send an email once in 6 months, they would have long forgotten you. Sporadic emailing will surprise them. Send an email to them at least once a month(bare minimum). Because if you don’t, someone else will.
This is the easiest way to identify bounces and keep it below 1%. This also enables you to have a clean and current email list.
4. Run a Re-engagement Campaign
Sometimes you may have a lot of subscribers but with most of them being inactive. Continuing to send them marketing emails or blog updates is not going to help. It can affect your open rates adversely. They can also end up being spam traps if the email IDs have themselves been inactive for a long time.
But that doesn’t mean you have to remove them immediately. Try making them active by sending an email specifically targeted to re-engage them.
Identify subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in the last three months and run a special campaign for them. Be very innovative with the content.
Below is an example of an innovative Re-engagement campaign by Coursera:
Have an Unsubscribe option in this email so they can unsubscribe if they don’t want to engage with your content in the future.
You can then remove those subscribers who haven’t opened your re-engagement email.
5. Don’t purchase mailing lists
It is every content creator’s dream for their content to reach a lot of people and multiply their subscribers by manifold. But if you decide to go the inorganic way and buy a mailing list, the people on the list will ignore your email because they didn’t subscribe in the first place. Additionally, you can’t judge the quality and the recency of the list.
You also run the risk of your emails being marked as spam, affecting your deliverability and damaging your Sender reputation. Not just your Sender reputation but also your company’s reputation. Irate people may lash out on you in Social media.
You are in fact, spending money to buy trouble.
Your Email Service Provider can close your account or even take legal action against you because most of them have strict Terms and Agreement against buying of lists. Some countries also have strict anti-spam laws to ensure that their people are protected against email promotion of content without their permission.
The best solution is to never use an email list. Instead, write engaging content, use Double opt-in forms and promote your content on different platforms. Your Subscriber count will increase automatically. Promotion requires a lot of patience and time but the end result is your own loyal subscribers who want to engage with your content.
6. Run Segment based Campaigns
It is simple to put all your Subscribers in a single email campaign. But you might have got these Subscribers through the promotion of different kinds of content. If you run targeted email campaigns based on the different type of Subscribers and send them the most relevant content for them, you are likely to have higher open and click rates.
You can use Tools like SendOut to create different Segments, add the relevant Subscribers to each and simply select a particular segment for sending a targeted Email campaign. For example, you could be an author with multiple genres of books and different set of subscribers for each genre. If you release a new book in the genre Fantasy, you can send an email campaign notifying only the Subscribers of Fantasy genre. They will be more interested in it than someone who reads a different genre like Romance.
7. Remove Generic Email Addresses
Sometimes you may get subscribers with generic email addresses like info@mycompany.com, sales@mycompany.com etc. These email addresses don’t have a specific receiver so your mail might end up being blocked by spam filters. If it reaches the inbox, it may still not reach the intended recipient since anyone can open and read the email.
The main purpose of running an email campaign is to engage your subscribers with relevant content. If your content doesn’t reach the right people, it doesn’t solve the purpose. Your engagement rates will also get affected.
Remove these generic addresses from your mailing list and target only those who have subscribed with their names. These are your kin because they are real people and you know whom to address.
8. Allow Subscribers to Unsubscribe
Your Subscribers may choose Unsubscribe because you are probably sending them too many emails or they may like being a part of some of your lists but not everything. Or they simply don’t find your content relevant or engaging. When they click on Unsubscribe, ask them how frequently they want to receive your emails and give them an option to select which lists they want to opt out from.
If they still choose Unsubscribe, harden your hearts and remove them from your mailing list. Emailing them still is against the law. It can also hurt your reputation.
9. Include an update profile link
Over time, many recipients may change their email addresses and move on to newer ones. But they may not remember to go to your website and subscribe again to your content.
If you include a link for them to update their profile in your emails, they can then easily change their email address. This is the best way to reduce stale email addresses and have a more up to date list.
All this is not hard to follow but you have to make a conscious decision about using a clean email list and work regularly towards it.
Do comment if you face any challenges while trying to maintain a healthy email list. Also let me know if there are any other methods you follow to maintain email list hygiene that is missed here.
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