What is a healthy email list? Glad you asked, we’re here to help you understand how an unhealthy email list can quickly turn your marketing efforts into a downward spiral.
Email health entails cleaning out inactive email subscribers from your future email marketing campaigns and keeping your remaining list warm with healthy email sending habits.
Performing email hygiene regularly will ensure you are only emailing the people who truly want your messages, which also helps you avoid your email being sent to the recipient’s junk folder or even worse, marked as SPAM.
How to Use a Healthy Email List to Close More Sales
Email service providers (ESPs) have become smarter and more attuned to what recipients want to receive in their inbox. This means a clean list is a must when it comes to getting your emails delivered to your subscriber’s inbox. ESPs are digging in deep to the emails you’re sending, and the engagement recipients are having with those messages.
Beyond monitoring spam complaints, ESPs are calculating opens, clicks, unsubscribes, inactivity and more into the algorithms that decide inbox placement. Once a recipient opts into your content, it is extremely important for you to monitor and track their behavior over time. We are not saying to stalk them, but just be sure that you pay close attention to warning signs.
Permission to send emails does not last forever, even the most engaged subscribers can lose interest after some time, which can mean they become more of a liability than an asset.
In this article, we will teach you healthy email list habits that will keep your list clean, your business off the spam lists, and ensure your marketing emails are delivered and opened. Trust Fullmoon Digital to help you achieve these habits and take this off your hands.
First Things First
Focus on the email terminology every small business owner should get familiar with.
What’s the worst possible thing that could happen to your email? It gets marked as spam.
OK, but how do you know if you’re sending an email that is likely to be marked as spam?
Believe it or not, the a healthy email list matters just as much—if not more—than the emails you send. If you have proper email list habits, and you have a healthy list, your emails are much less likely to be marked as spam because your subscribers are warm and engaged. But what does “warm and engaged” mean exactly?
Email Engagement
To sum things up, “engagement” is interaction with your email, including opens and clicks. From the perspective of an ESP, however, engagement is a bit more technical.
ESPs consider “engagement” as one or more of the following:
Recent opt-ins — These would be email subscribers that have opted into your marketing list, showing a recent interest in your company’s emails. Remember that a recent opt-in could be a false or illegitimate address, so it is important to ensure you’re tracking engagement so you can promptly remove those types of addresses.
Another remedy to ensure that a subscriber is who they say they are, is by implementing the beloved double opt-in (email confirmation) into your marketing campaigns. This extra step has its pros and cons, but at the end of the day, you want to be sure that every person who signs up is there for one reason!
Opens and clicks in the last 120 days — Once a subscriber is added to your marketing list, these are the two actions you should monitor over time. While opens are an effective metric, clicks are a much more accurate representation of engagement.
Why you wonder? Because if the subscriber opts not to display images when they open your email, or they view the email via the preview pane in their email program, your ESP will not record the open. Just another reason to send highly targeted emails, with a call to action to keep your subscribers engaged.
Warm Email List
A warm healthy email list is comprised of subscribers who have opted in, been contacted in the last four months, and are regularly engaging with your emails. This sounds simple, but for many small businesses, it’s a challenge to figure out how to get this step moving in the right direction.
Many companies have placed a sign-up box on their website, written a compelling lead gen asset, and collected email addresses. Yet life and business got in the way, and one day they realize they have a growing, but inactive list. Or they’re regularly sending emails, but engagement—in the form of clicks, opens, and other actions—is low.
Not only is this situation not good on your time, but it can also hurt your standing with your ESP—and get you black-listed. You must keep the warmth of your email list at the top of your business priority list. We cannot stress this enough and when we take over your email campaigns, we always have this at the very top of our minds.
To drill the point home again—how your ESP views your emails is a big deal. The metrics they use to determine inbox placement is your pot of gold as a sender. It should be a driving force for you to keep the most active and engaged leads in your database. Tracking the engagement of your leads using tags empowers you to not only identify inactive subscribers but also take action to clean them off your list.
Cold Email List
A cold email list is one that hasn’t been contacted for four or more months. If you have sent no email communications to your list in the last four months, you can consider it a cold email list.
Unfortunately, this list of email addresses should not be sent any email communication. It’s just bad email etiquette and in a world of immediate response, it will not be received well—by your subscribers or your ESP.
Email List Cleaning
Your first step to proper email list health is to ensure that you’re working with a list of email subscribers who want your messages. It’s easier to drive conversions and engagement with clients who are excited to be in your ecosystem.
Send a re-engagement email that takes one of the following approaches:
- Asks people who have opened your email in the last six months to click a link and confirm they still want to be on your list
- Gives list members different subscription options, such as receiving every email or signing up for a digest
- Confirms that their email address is still current and that they don’t want to update their email preferences
Evaluate Cause of Death
Your subscribers were probably not dead on arrival. As the list owner, it’s imperative that you evaluate what’s causing the drop-off in interest, so you can fix the problem. Some common causes of decreased email engagement include:
Silence — You left them hungry for content by not sending emails.
No value — You sent out nothing but promotional emails and didn’t create value for your audience.
Missing the point — Your content didn’t resonate with your audience.
Overwhelm — Your subscribers get too many messages and yours didn’t stand out.
Get your subscribers to tell you what they want, what they really, really want. Whether you missed the mark during your initial email campaign, or you’re re-engaging after a long absence, it’s important to understand what your audience does want, so ASK THEM.
How to Find Out What They Want
Send an email asking your subscribers why they signed up, and what kinds of information, content, and insights you can offer that will make them stick around. If you want to test specific hypotheses, use a survey.
Conduct research on what your audience wants and what your competitors aren’t providing to find the sweet spot for your message and content. Take a data-driven approach to relaunching your list to ensure you’re on the right track.
Re-engaging a Cold Email List
If you’re going to reconnect with your list, or just relaunch the way you engage, make it an event. What can you do that delivers massive value and immediately reminds subscribers why it’s good to be in your orbit?
Go all out. Don’t hold back. Make your re-engagement offer so interesting and so exciting that it acts as an effective defibrillator to your entire list. If you’re worried an email won’t be well-received by your cold subscribers, all is not lost. You do have other options for re-engaging them:
- A phone call
- Letter or postcard
- Push notifications
- SMS
- Personal one-off email from your own email client
- Use social media
- Website pop-up (if subscribers’ login your site)
How to Revive Email Health and Warm Up Your Re-engaged Email List
Now that you’ve re-engaged your subscribers, you must commit to maintaining your list going forward, and implement a list hygiene plan so leads never go cold again.
Decide what you can reasonably commit to, and then establish that as the basis of your email strategy. Will you send content daily, weekly, or monthly? Under-commit and over-deliver if possible.
Use your intel on what subscribers really want and come up with a schedule of content that’s laser-targeted to your audience.
- Write long form, high-value content your readers will love
- Experiment with video
- Curate the best information in your industry
- Offer subscribers exclusive discounts
Deliver value again and again on a regular schedule until your readers look forward to receiving your emails.
All can be very overwhelming, but we are here to fully take over and help keep your list as healthy as possible. Let us help you by doing all the legwork. We will monitor and optimize daily tasks to make sure that each subscriber has a purpose and clear understanding of what they have signed up for.
