Your email marketing list needs to be sanitized and organized if you hope to succeed. This process isn’t difficult, as many of today’s email marketing platforms make importing, exporting and organizing your list as easy as choosing a few settings and pressing submit. The following is a brief rundown of the steps you might take to clean up your email marketing list to get it ready for the big time.
Sanitizing Your List
Your email marketing list needs to be scrubbed of non-responsive subscribers in order to make it more efficient and to cut down on the resources that you expend to keep in contact with your audience. This is as easy as selecting those addresses that haven’t exhibited any activity in the last ninety days. You might want to send out a communication to everyone on your list at first to ask them to continue to opt-in. If anyone doesn’t respond, cut them and move on to the next step.
Checking Data for Errors and Blanks
You may have thousands of email marketing subscribers, but you should still do your best to ensure that you have as much information as possible on each subscriber. This enables you to send personalized messages later on. For instance, you can use the subscriber’s first name in the subject line, the purchase they just made in the body of the email and then their hometown in the closer. This causes the message to truly resonate with your intended audience and that leads to more link clicks and more conversions.
Prioritize Your Email Marketing List
The rest of your list, the ones that responded to your re-opt-in, should be segmented according to your subscribers’ interest levels. The ones who purchased items, for instance, will go to the top of the list. They will make up their own segment and can then be sent targeted messages enticing those subscribers to spread the word about their purchase and to become a repeat customer.
Next, you might create a segment for those that expressed some interest. These are the wishy washy crew and need to be sent valuable information to convince them that your business is the one to choose. This email marketing segment may contain many segments, again depending on subscribers’ interest levels. For example, you might have a segment for those who only created an account, those who filled and abandoned shopping carts and those that made a purchase but then requested a refund.
You may have dozens or several dozen segments, all depending on who you want to target. You may have a segment dedicated to a certain landing page, or a segment associated with a particular YouTube video. Not only does segmenting your email marketing list make it easier to send targeted messages, but it makes it easy to track and test your results.
Tracking Results
The order with which you segment your email marketing list at first is likely to change as your business progresses. Your not-so-hot leads may turn out to be your best customers somewhere down the line. This requires you to nurture your leads and entice them to move up the segment chain any way you can.
Using the email marketing platform’s analytics data, keep organizing your email marketing list and segmenting as appropriate. Then choose regular intervals to scrub and sanitize your list, such as once every six weeks or months.
Testing Results
A well segmented email marketing list provides you with a number of unique audiences that you can use to hone your marketing message. You can send one list to a landing page of one color and another list to the same landing page in a different color to see which list is more responsive. The more segments you have and the more traffic you can send to your test elements, the more data you can glean. This can help you target your messages even more, making email marketing an even more effective means of reaching out to those who matter most.
Tips of Results
Now that you know the importance of keeping a well segmented and analyzed email marketing list, your first step is to sanitize the entire thing. Get rid of those non-responders, as they will only hold you back. Then get to work structuring your list in order from interested to on-the-fence and every segment in between. Then send out messages, track and test if you hope to grow your list and your email marketing list results.
Image Source: Mike Schinkel on Flickr
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