Maintaining healthy email lists

- Maintaining your email list is the key to a healthy and effective email marketing strategy and it really goes with the old saying, if you don't use it, you lose it. Your list is a collection of people who have subscribed to hear from you by providing their emails and this is a privilege. By taking care of this list, you're ensuring it stays up-to-date so that it can be an effective part of your marketing strategy. Here's what I mean by maintaining your list. First, get permission. Everyone on your list should have opted in to get emails from you.

If you are unsure if you should add a person to your list, ask them. Second, it's recommended to keep one master list. This means that every single subscriber you have is on this list. Then, you can use groups to organize and further segment your subscribers. Here you can see Hansel and Petal has three lists. They have their Hansel and Petal monthly newsletter, they have their Hansel and Petal customers, and then they have their free giveaway subscribers. It'll be my recommendation to them that they have only one master list and then they further segment into customers, giveaway subscribers, and any other further segments they wish.

Keeping one master list will help you avoid compliance issues. An example is if someone unsubscribes from a list, wishing to unsubscribe from them all, and then they continue to get emails from you because it turns out they're still on one of your other lists. Maintaining one master list will simplify your email management and even reduce your monthly cost. Third, re-engage or remove inactive subscribers. These are people that haven't opened an email campaign of yours for an extended period of time and you can find these users in MailChimp by heading to your lists dashboard, selecting your master list, and then choosing to create a segment.

Here I'm going to select campaign activity and what I've chosen is that I want to see all the people that have not opened all of the last five campaigns. This means that this person is really unengaged. Then, what I can do is I can create a segment containing all these people that have not opened the last five campaigns and then I can create an email campaign targeting them. This is an opportunity to re-engage with them and possibly win their business, but if they remain inactive after this win-back campaign, it is recommended that then I can remove them from my list.

The goal is to keep your list fresh and engaged and this is a great way to do that. Fourth, don't let your list go stale. If you do have large gaps of time in-between email campaigns you run the risk of subscribers forgetting who you are and that they even opted-in to hear from your business. This means that they may unsubscribe or even mark your email as spam. Stale lists also are known to have lower open rates. If this does happen to you, you will want to reconfirm that subscriber's interest in being on your list by sending out a new email campaign.

Fifth, keep an eye on your bounces. Bounces occur when an email can't be delivered to an email address. When an email bounces, it's classified as either a soft or hard bounce. Hard bounces happen when an email can't be delivered. This can be caused by an invalid email address or by an unexpected error during sending. Soft bounces are recognized by the email server, but are returned to the sender because a mailbox is either full or temporarily unavailable. High bounce rates are often caused by lists that have gone stale or addresses that were improperly entered or imported.

If you haven't sent a campaign in awhile, reconfirm your list to keep your contact information up-to-date. Maintaining a healthy list means continuing to grow your subscribers while taking care of the ones already on your list. Now, it's your turn. Familiarize yourself with your own list by logging into the email marketing provider you use and looking at things like bounces, your subgroups if you have them, and don't forget to send out some emails.