Email is still one of the best ways to contact your
subscribers and prospects and convert them into
buyers. The research shows that
the customer conversion via email has increased by 4X in the last few years. But email is effective if you send to people who want to
hear from you. If you send to a "bad" list, your marketing efforts
are useless and can have a negative impact on your business because:
recipients won't read your emails or mark them as spam;
your bounce and spam complaint rate will raise;
your email open rate and click-through rate will decrease;
your deliverability and sender reputation will be spoiled;
your account with your ISP or email service provider can be
suspended;
you can violate CAN-SPAM law.
So, it's important that you regularly verify your email
lists to ensure everyone on your list has a valid email address and actually
wants to receive your messages. It can be tempting to have a huge email list.
But sending messages to people who did not subscribe to your emails and don’t
have any business relationship with you will spoil your sender reputation with
your ISP or email service provider.
In this article I’ll study what bad and good email lists
are, and what you can do to turn your bad list into a good one. By the end,
you'll feel more secured in email marketing.
What is a Bad Email List?
You can tell that your email list is bad if:
1) you bought, borrowed or harvested emails on the Internet
Any email list that is available for sale or rent will be of
a low quality because nobody would share his good list with any 3rd party. As
you probably know, money is on the list. The list is valuable for the time a
relevant content is being sent to it. So, every good email marketer will keep
his "golden" list private and secure.
When people start receiving irrelevant emails, they lose
interest and respond reluctantly. The common actions on unwanted emails are 1)
delete, 2) unsubscribe, and 3) report as spam. The most harmless one is
"unsubscribe" if you process unsubscribe requests after that and
delete unsubscribed recipients from your list.
Spam reports hurt your sender reputation and make it
difficult for your future emails to get delivered. The worst thing is that many
email service providers suspend the sender's account if they exceed certain
spam complaint and bounce rate.
The deletion of emails by the recipient is also terrible for
your reputation and can result in your emails being filtered as spam. Some
providers, for example, Gmail, rely on prior recipient's actions on the
messages to classify new emails. If previous messages from the sender were
deleted, new emails are likely to be classified as spam.
2) it's growing by leaps and bounds
The quantity of emails doesn't always account for their
quality. The fast growth of the email list means that either bots are
subscribing to your newsletters, or your team is buying email addresses. In
either case, list quality is low.
3) it's old
People change companies, Internet service providers, and
abandon their email addresses. This is a reality. So, if you have not emailed
to your list for about a year or more, you can expect that many addresses on
your list are not valid anymore.
One of the keys to successful email marketing is
consistency. You have to email consistently in order not to let your list
"freeze". If you do not email for too long, people can forget you and
your list value will decline in term of conversions.
4) it generates a high bounce rate
If you sent an email and got a high bounce rate, it's a sign
that your list is full of invalid email addresses. Your email service provider
sees you as a spammy marketer and can suspend your account, so your further
emails are never delivered.
It’s important to differentiate hard and soft bounces before
removing the email from your list.
A hard bounce means that the email address is permanently
undeliverable, which happens when the message was sent to an invalid or blocked
email address. Many ESP, for example, Amazon SES, allows a hard bounce rate 5%
or less. You must take hard bounce email addresses off your list after each
mailing.
A soft bounce means that the email address is temporarily
undeliverable and can happen if someone has an auto-responder or their inbox is
full. Keep soft bounce emails on your list, but watch them — if an email is
recorded as a soft bounce more than twice, then this email address is most
likely inactive and you should remove it from your list.
Just how clean is your data? Identify where your data requires attention, allowing you to choose which areas to improve.
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What is a Good Email List?
Now when you know which email lists not to use for email
marketing, let's see what a good email list looks like. Good email lists are
built organically and internally. You can tell that you have a good email list
if:
1) it's permission-based
Email marketing is about permission, trust, value, and
relevancy. People trust you and give you the permission to send them emails.
Only by sending relevant emails to people who have given you permission to do
it, you build further relationship and strengthen trust and credibility with
your subscribers who then become your customers.
2) you already have business relationship with your
recipients
If you have records on people who already bought something
from you or used your service in the past, there is nothing wrong if you send
them emails and offer another product or service that complements the one they
already have. Existing customers are best buyers.
How to Turn a Bad List into Good One
If, by this point, you see that you have a good email list,
you are a lucky marketer. Keep it up! If you understand that your list is bad,
try the following tips to make your bad list a good one:
1) Separate "fresh" email addresses.
You'll want to prioritize contacts who joined your list not
a long time ago. For segmentation, use either the date of subscription, date of
the email acquisition, last interaction date when the user last opened your
email or clicked a link or another age indicator. But don’t overdo in order not
to end up with just a dozen of contacts because the return will be low.
2) Try to re-engage inactive users.
Have a portion of subscribers who have never opened or
clicked through your emails?
At first, determine the subscribers who haven’t acted upon
your emails for several years and remove them from your list, as they will likely
increase the number of spam complaints.
Then, try to send a re-engagement email to the rest of your
list. Create a compelling email message that gives them the choice to
re-subscribe to your newsletters – otherwise, you'll take them off your list.
Use this email to ask for feedback too to learn what their interest and
marketing needs are.
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