One of the pillars of email marketing success is effective email list management. But what practices are most effective?
In this guide to list management, we will consider this process in detail and share some of the best practices that will help you use your email list effectively.
What Is Email List Management?
Email list management is everything you do to get new subscribers, segment the existing contacts, and keep your email list healthy — that is, stick to engaged subscribers who ensure your open rates are high and your spam history is clean.
Ensuring your open rates are high means it’s more likely that subscribers read your emails and take the target action. But not all contacts from your list are actually useful. Given that the average churn rate is 83%, about 17% of the emails you send don’t even reach your contacts’ inboxes. This may happen if the subs on your list block your emails or send them to spam, or if any of the contacts on your mailing list are fake.
If your emails remain unopened or end up in a spam folder, it will have a negative impact on your company’s sender reputation and therefore undermine the success of your marketing campaigns.
Of course, stopping this process is impossible, but proper list management can help you minimize your churn rate and achieve better results.
Why Is List Management Important?
People who subscribe to your emails are interested in your products or services. All of your contacts, however, have different needs and goals, so there’s no point in sending the same emails to all of them unless these are newsletters or emails with updates on your company’s policies. This is called audience segmentation.
If your email list isn’t properly structured, sending the right emails to the right recipients can be a challenging task. Selecting recipients manually from a disorganized Excel list can take too much time and effort, while proper list management enables you to do it in just a few clicks.
How List Management Can Help You
Proper email list management offers businesses numerous advantages, and here are the most important benefits you should keep in mind.
- Maintain healthy relationships with your audience
The more relevant your offers, the more opportunities you have to build strong long-term relationships with your subscribers. For instance, if your target audience is students, and they have asked you: “please write my paper,” you should send emails related to paper writing. - Save resources
Every marketer’s goal is to send emails to people who will be interested in them at a minimal cost and with minimum effort. When you manage your email list, you can ensure that it only features valid addresses of people who are actually interested in your offers. Thus, you will grow your sender reputation along with your engagement level and minimize bounce rate while increasing the deliverability of your emails. - Get more accurate results
Through analyzing click-through, unsubscribe, and open rates, along with other metrics, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. You won’t be able to rely on these metrics, however, if you don’t have a healthy email list.
How to Build an Email List with Mailbird
A good email tool allows you to manage your email list much easier. The following steps will help you set up an email contact list.
Step 1. Choose an Email Service Provider
First, you should choose an email service provider for your business account. Here are some of the most popular options.
Gmail
This is probably the most popular email provider, with more than 1.5 billion active users from all over the globe. By registering a business Gmail account, you also get 15 gigabytes of storage space, mobile apps, and integration with the entire Google ecosystem.
Gmail offers great uptime and protection against spam and malware. The main disadvantages of Gmail are that good domain names for your business may already be taken, and target advertising can be quite annoying.
A business Gmail account costs $6 per month, and you can also buy a custom domain name for $5 per month for each user.
GMX Mail
This is a free email service provider appreciated by those who want to create many business accounts because it enables one user to create up to ten business email addresses.
The main advantage of this provider is that you can get unlimited storage space. GMX offers a reliable spam protection system and supports large attachments. However, it also has some significant disadvantages: inactive accounts are deactivated in six months, the customer service is much worse than that of Gmail, and this provider doesn’t support two-factor authentication.
Zoho Mail
This is another free service for businesses. It is completely ad-free, supports custom domain names, and offers various cloud applications that might be appreciated by small businesses. Zoho integrates with the Office suite.
You can use this provider for free, but the free plan only provides five gigabytes of storage space, and if you need more, a paid plan will cost you $2 per month.
ProtonMail
This email service offers great security, which is its main selling point. Here you can benefit from end-to-end encryption, and you don’t need to provide any personal data to create an account.
A free plan features one email address, 150 emails per day, and 500 megabytes of space. Paid plans cost €5 to €30 per month.
Tips for Choosing a Service Provider
- Ease of setup. Check if the chosen provider enables you to set up and configure your account easily. You don’t want to waste your time and effort at the setup stage.
- Security. Security is an especially important factor you should take into account when choosing an email provider. You should keep your email communication private, so look for services that offer two-factor authentication and end-to-end encryption.
- Custom domain availability. It’s also great if the chosen email provider enables you to use custom domain names so you can come up with domain names that correspond to your brand.
- Collaboration with other tools. Some providers also offer integration with various useful tools, including email management software, calendars, notes, etc.
Step 2. Create a Business Email Address
When creating a business email address, you should take into account some important factors, such as:
- Domain name
Your potential customers should be able to easily identify your domain name. It should be relevant, and it must seamlessly complement your brand. - Format
Make sure all of your employees use a standard format for their email addresses. For example, their email addresses may consist of their last names and position separated by a period. - Group addresses
Another good practice is creating group email addresses for departments so you can manage all the emails intended for a certain department from one place.
Step 3. Set Up Your Business Email Address in an Email Client
Once you’ve chosen a good email provider and domain name, you can set up your business email address. To do it, you need a reliable and convenient email client. The best choice is Mailbird because this solution offers better functionality than other solutions of this kind.
Mailbird supports multiple business accounts and integrates with lots of software, including Google Drive, WhatsApp, and Slack. Another great advantage of Mailbird is that it can work offline. Besides, Mailbird is very easy to set up:
- Download Mailbird.
- Add your account in the Accounts tab. You can also add several accounts and connect them to the Unified Inbox.
- Configure your account settings. In the Settings menu, you can choose POP or IMAP protocols and adjust notifications.
- Create folders for different types of emails. You can do this by clicking on the hamburger menu in the Settings section.
- Add the necessary integrations.
Mailbird enables you to use up to 30 integrations, both for personal and business use. For example, if you want to effectively manage your email list, you might appreciate the integration with the Mailbird Contacts Manager.
Email List Management: Best Practices
Here are seven top email list management practices you can try out:
Make Your New Contacts Feel Welcome
Your relationships with subscribers begin at the very first contact, so make sure this contact is as positive and pleasant for them as possible. Say, “thank you for subscribing” and ask the recipients to whitelist your email address so your emails won’t be filtered as spam. Make sure to personalize your welcome messages and suggest some of your best content to immediately communicate value.
Get inspiration from our blog: Business Email Examples.
Avoid Email Surplus
A surplus of emails is something you should avoid at any cost because getting too many emails is the main reason people unsubscribe. The best approach is to let your subscribers choose how often they want to hear from you. For example, they can specify the preferred frequency on the signup form. You can also let your subscribers choose what type of content they’re interested in.
Maintain List Hygiene
You should keep your email list clean to ensure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. We recommend that you clean your email list at least a few times a year, removing invalid addresses, duplicates, and addresses from soft and hard bounces, along with fixing addresses that contain typos. This way, you will minimize your bounce rate and improve your deliverability rate.
Remove Old Contacts
Some of the recipients who provided their valid addresses can become inactive and unengaged. In this case, the best approach is to try to re-engage them. If users don’t open your emails for six months or a year, you can target them for re-engagement drip campaigns, reminding them about the benefits of your solution, or even offering discounts and freebies.
Provide an Easy Unsubscribe Link
Although your ultimate objective is to keep recipients on your list, you should also make sure they can unsubscribe easily. If your contacts cannot quickly figure out how to unsubscribe, they will simply mark your emails as spam. Therefore, your emails should always have a visible unsubscribe button or link.
Never Buy Lists
The main reason you shouldn’t buy email lists is that it’s considered a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and can result in you paying a $16,000 fine for each email you’ve sent this way. Besides, purchased lists are generally bad because they are not tailored to your niche and brand. Moreover, such lists often contain spam traps: addresses that used to be valid and can immediately blacklist your email address if you send something to them.
Remember the Key Principles of List Management
The main principles of email list management are permission, verification, and segmentation. You should only send emails to people who gave you their permission. Verify addresses so your list will only contain useful contacts, and segment your audience to send properly targeted emails.
Conclusion
A properly managed email list can help you increase your ROI and ensure the success of your marketing efforts. However, no matter how many subscribers you have, you should keep in mind that quality is determined not by quantity but by results. Having loyal and engaged subscribers on your list is the right tactic for email marketing success.
To manage your email contacts effectively and easily, you should choose the right email client, and Mailbird is the best solution. It’s a perfect client created for businesses of any kind that makes communication between employees and clients as comfortable as possible. This client is also a great solution for managing remote employees. Download Mailbird today and get started with effective email list management.
