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6 Ways to Improve Your Email List
Written By Jim Herbold
Introduction
Email deliverability begins and ends with the quality of your list. ISPs are on the lookout for signs that your list is not so good-- namely, too many bounces from outdated addresses and spam complaints from wary recipients. Both of these red flags are avoidable-- if you follow permission-marketing best practices.
The first tenet of permission-based marketing is that permission is not optional, negotiable or something you can kinda, sorta pretend that you have. People either want to hear from you or they don’t.
Start thinking of email marketing as your company’s primary tool for building relationships and moving users through the customer life cycle. It’s a lot like dating, actually. Focus on:
- making a great first opt-in impression
- setting the stage for a great relationship with a benefits-driven welcome email
- keeping communication channels open via email preference centers
- giving subscribers an easy way out by periodically re-opting-in your list
- breaking up with dignity via your unsubscribe process.
I know, I know. Best practices always sound good on paper, but at the end of the day, they’re just words. This article has fewer words telling you what to do and more pictures showing what these best practices look like in action.
Let's go!
Put opt-ins everywhere
Like a politician canvassing the country for votes or a cheerleader vying for Miss Popularity, your opt-in message needs to be everywhere at once-- on your home page, navigation menus, graphic images, landing pages, registration forms and even shopping carts. The goal? To collect subscribes at every place that your site touches users.
Optimize your opt-in page
All those opt-in teasers that you liberally sprinkled all over your site should point to an opt-in page that sells the benefits of joining your list. This is the pre-blind-date telephone call, or the "tell me about yourself" part of the job interview. It should:
- Sell the value of your newsletter or communications program with sample emails, customer testimonials and incentives for signing up.
- Manage expectations about how often subscribers will be contacted and spell out your privacy/email policy.
- Capture the "right" amount of information-- usually first name, last name, email address, format preference (HTML or text) and just enough demographics to specifically target your emails. Asking for the email address only, makes signing up a breeze, but may not provide you with enough intelligence.
- Prevent typos and bad addresses with a script that checks for syntax errors or a secondary box that requires users to re-enter their addresses.
Welcome new subscribers
Most companies display a thank you page after new subscribers opt in-- and that’s a necessary courtesy. But what happens if your next scheduled email communication is weeks -- or even months -- away? By that time, subscribers may have forgotten what they signed up for or that they even signed up at all-- and that leads to spam complaints.
That’s what makes a prompt welcome message so important. Your welcome message is like a first date. It should engage the recipient, immediately reinforce the benefits of subscribing and set the stage for a lasting relationship.
Link to back issues of your newsletter, present introductory offers and, of course, deliver any promised white papers or incentives.
Re-opt-in to scrub your lists
If you’ve been climbing the slippery slope of half-baked permission known as opt out, you almost certainly need to clean up your list. Opt out generally means you collected addresses any way you could-- buying lists, scavenging business cards, whatever it took. If the subscriber never specifically unsubscribed, you assumed permission.
Opt out, unfortunately, leads to high bounce rates and spam complaints-- the very things that guarantee a spot on ISP blacklists.
Here’s how to clean up your list. Send a "re-opt-in" email and remove all users who do not reconfirm their interest. Let me repeat that: remove all users who do not reconfirm their interest. And again: remove all users who do not reconfirm their interest.
Make sure your opt-in invitation addresses privacy concerns and sells your newsletter’s benefits. More importantly, segment your list and distribute your opt-in invitation to no more than 5,000 to 10,000 recipients at a time, spread out over one or two weeks. This minimizes the ISPs’ too-many-bounces red flag.
While you’re at it, vary your subject lines and test out different offers to reengage recipients. Since you’re segmenting your campaign anyway, why not use this exercise to determine which offers and messages get the best response?
At the end of your re-opt-in process, you’ll have a smaller -- but much more responsive -- list of people who really do want to hear from you.
Unsubscribe powerfully
It goes without saying that if you do not make it easy for subscribers to say goodbye, they are more likely to report you as spam. But you can say goodbye in a way that provides value-- both for you and for your subscriber.
Don’t just do the terse "thank you, you are now unsubscribed" confirmation page. Treat your unsubscribe page more like a landing page: give subscribers options to manage their subscriptions, update their email addresses, discover your other email programs and explain why they are leaving.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve seen for yourself how to incorporate permission-marketing best practices into your email program, I sincerely hope that you will actually do the work.
In my experience, many marketers feel powerless in the face of email deliverability challenges. You start picturing yourself as Little Red Riding Hood confronting the "big, bad ISP," never realizing that deliverability is entirely within your control.
The equation is simple: fill your lists with people who actually do want to hear from you and you will reduce the number of bounces and spam complaints that can cause the big, but-not-so-bad ISP to bear its fangs.
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