Building and Maintaining Engaged Email Lists
Digital marketers live in a world of complex and ever-evolving challenges. One of the most important, and oftentimes most confounding, is how to effectively build and maintain healthy email marketing lists.
In other words, how do you keep your email list stable (or growing), active and engaged?
The key to sharing a client’s message hinges on the ability to successfully reach subscribers and move them to action – simply put, the health of an email list is one of the greatest drivers of bottom line performance results.
Email marketing has been major focus of The Prosper Group’s business since our founding a decade ago. We have a depth of experience that few others can match, and we are always honing our expertise.
Here are five steps that we’ve found are highly effective in building and maintaining healthy email lists.
1) Scrub the “deadwood” – i.e. remove unresponsive/inactive email addresses
When it comes to email marketing lists, quality trumps quantity. By removing email records that contain inactive records, you ensure that all of the addresses on the list are able or willing to engage in the content you’re sending. This saves money by eliminating wasted sending costs, maximizes list deliverability rates, and ensures you’re ridding your lists of addresses email providers have converted into spam traps.
2) Build a dedicated website or landing page
Getting a subscriber to click through an email is only the first step to effective long-term engagement and list health. An attractive and functional website or landing page will help deliver a positive overall experience for subscribers, which will help drive immediate conversions and future engagement.
3) Welcome email series
If you are acquiring email addresses via signups, those new subscribers tend to be most engaged in the days immediately following their completion of the signup process. Delivering an email welcome series to these subscribers (introduction and engagement emails written specifically for new subscribers and sent at pre-determined time intervals) makes them comfortable with receiving future email appeals and offers.
4) Newsletter content
Sending a periodic newsletter has proven to be another great way to drive stronger overall engagement from list subscribers. Content is king – people want to receive information they perceive valuable to them, and all the better if it is “exclusive” content that only your client or organization can provide.
5) Email acquisition
With slow and steady list attrition a natural part of the email marketing process, ongoing acquisition to keep list counts steady (or, better yet, growing) is critical to the long-term health of a list. It also keeps the audience fresh, leading to higher overall response rates.
If you see troubling trends with your email list engagement, I can’t recommend the five steps above highly enough. And if you have additional questions regarding professional list management and brokerage, contact us today.
