Email List Management Best Practices

Managing email lists allows marketers to not waste their email marketing efforts.

To ensure that your email marketing efforts are not wasted, it is essential to implement these email list management best practices.

Before a company can even begin to think about creating an email campaign, they need a sufficient list of emails to send their campaign to. Maintaining a good email marketing list will help your marketing team ensure that their email campaign efforts are not wasted on a non-existing or outdated email list.

Email List Management Best Practices

• • Send Welcome Emails

A great contact list management practice is to welcome new subscribers with a welcome email. Companies can use an email list management software that will send out a triggered response email to new subscribers, thanking them for joining their email list. This triggered email should also ask subscribers to add them to their approved senders list to ensure they receive all your emails and those emails don’t end up in their junk folder.

• • Offer Subscription Management Options

Receiving too many emails is the number one reason people unsubscribe from email lists. It is very beneficial for companies to offer their email subscribers an option to decrease the number of emails they get pertaining to a specific campaign or even the amount of emails they receive altogether. Offering subscription management options will allow your company to stay compliant with Canadian and European laws regarding customer information.

• • Keep Your List Updated

Many companies forget to keep their email lists updated to ensure the success of their ongoing email campaign. It has been proven that 25% of a company’s email list drops off each year, so it is essential that a company consistently ensures that their email list is full of engaged receivers. People often get new email addresses and stop using out-of-date ones. It is very beneficial to regularly purge your email list of invalid emails to keep the list up-to-date.

• • Eliminate Unengaged Subscribers

One very beneficial email marketing best practice is to send re-engagement emails and eliminate subscribers that are no longer interested in being apart of your email campaigns. It is easy to determine these subscribers because although they have a valid email address and are still subscribed, they have not opened or clicked on your emails for a long time. Eliminating these subscribers frees up room for you to add subscribers to your email list that will be engaged and welcome your email campaigns.

• • Provide Easy Unsubscribe Options

Providing subscription management and unsubscribe options ensures that your company is compliant with Canadian and European data protection laws. Allowing subscribers to easily unsubscribe is an excellent email database management best practice. It is never in a company’s best interest to hide or make the unsubscribe button hard to find because an uninterested subscriber is only taking up valuable room on your email list that could be filled with a subscriber that does have interest in your email campaigns. What’s worse is if an uninterested subscriber can’t find your unsubscribe option and marks your emails as spam, adding your email campaigns to the large spam database the internet uses to determine spam emails.

Free Email List Management

For companies with a small amount of capital to spend on email list management tools, these free tools will be very beneficial to them. No matter how small your company is, it is essential to manage your email list and a good email management software can help.

• • SendInBlue
  • MailChimp
  • MadMimi
  • Constant Contact
  • Target Hero

It is extremely beneficial for companies to implement these email list management best practices to ensure that their email list is constantly updated with engaged subscribers. The most beneficial email list for any company is one that only includes engaged, updated subscribers and is not wasting email marketing efforts on unengaged or uninterested ones.