Maintain Your List

TL;DR: Develop a better sense of who you’re trying to reach, identifying and removing bounced emails, and capitalizing on opportunities to reconnect with disengaged subscribers.

Why List Management Is Important for Email Marketing Success

When you’re running a business, efficiency is key. It’s one thing to want a clean and organized database of contacts, it’s another thing to make time for it. Whether you’re handling a small newsletter or a large marketing campaign, keeping your email lists organized, accurate, and up-to-date is essential for effective communication and engagement.

Understand Your Target Audience for Better Engagement

When you started your business or nonprofit, or joined a company to handle their marketing, you had a vision. For example, if you operate a bakery you’re looking for customers! It doesn’t have to be customers, though. Maybe you’re a club just communicating with your members. Even still, “customers” and “members” are quite broad. 

What demographics are relevant to your marketing efforts? Demographics can include things like age, gender, or location but can also entail preferences on how frequently you want to communicate with your audience or their interest in a particular part of your business/organization. A customer of a bakery might only be interested in a selection of bread items and not their desserts, so the bakery should tailor their content accordingly. The bakery could have a Bread Lovers list and a Dessert Lovers list (I’d be on this one) and develop interesting content for each of them.

If you’re a club-like organization, you might offer different services to older members versus younger. For example, you wouldn’t necessarily want to send information about youth sports to older members.

Help Your Future Self with Preventative Measures

What this means is you can take preventative measures to organize your email lists so when you start growing your audience, all the necessary guardrails are already in place.

• Confirm Opt-in: Use Confirm Opt-in to make it so subscribers have to manually click on a link in an email to confirm their interest in receiving future emails. If a prospective subscriber doesn’t click the link, you won’t be able to send it to them and that’s okay. They weren’t interested anyway. Of course, maybe they missed it so you can always send a Reconfirm Opt-in email to get them next time around.

• Set expectations: When someone lands on your sign-up form, set expectations on how often they can expect to hear from you and what type of emails they will receive (newsletters, promotional messaging, etc).

• Choose which information to collect: Email is a mandatory field on our sign-up forms, but everything else is optional. The general rule of thumb is to limit the amount of information you request from prospective subscribers because they are more likely to get scared off if they’re being asked for too much. You can choose from a selection of standard fields (e.g. City, Company, Birthday, etc) or include your own custom fields (e.g. Hair Color, Age, Spirit Animal, and so forth).

Before you even create your sign-up form or other list growth tools, take 15 minutes and write down all the relevant demographic information you can think of that would be beneficial to have on hand for your marketing efforts.

Automate Your Workflow with CRM Integrations

Constant Contact isn’t a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, even if there are similarities. However, we do integrate with many different CRMs! If your business or nonprofit is already utilizing a CRM platform, then check to see if it has an official integration with Constant Contact. Even if it doesn’t, a third-party tool like Zapier might be able to help integrate the two platforms. Every CRM is different, but by integrating with one, you can greatly enhance your list management.

The CRM integration will automatically update contact information in Constant Contact, ensuring that your list remains accurate and up-to-date. Plus, you can leverage the CRM data to segment your audience and send targeted and personalized emails that are more likely to engage your subscribers.

It's Time to Clean Up Bounced Emails

Throw a ball at a wall and what happens? It bounces back (cue GIF of the guy doing the ‘mind blown’ gesture with his hands)! There are many reasons why an email might bounce back, so it’s important to not treat all bounced emails as one problem. At the same time, keeping your bounce rate low is essential for maintaining a good sender reputation and ensuring successful delivery, so don’t sit on them!

• Monitor bounce rates regularly: Aim to keep your bounce rate under 3%. If it exceeds 8%, it’s a red flag that requires immediate attention.

• Identify and remove hard bounces: Hard bounces are emails that will never be delivered due to invalid or non-existent addresses. Removing these from your list is crucial to avoid damaging your sender reputation.

• Track soft bounces: Soft bounces occur due to temporary issues like full inboxes. Tag and monitor these addresses. If they consistently bounce, consider removing them.

• Correct misspellings: If an email bounces due to a typo, correct it if you have the right information or reach out to the subscriber to confirm their address.

• Use permission reminders: Add a line at the top of your emails reminding subscribers that they opted in and why. This can reduce spam reports and unsubscribes.

• Conduct regular list cleans: Schedule list cleanings every three months to remove inactive or problematic subscribers. This helps maintain a healthy list and improves overall engagement.

Take a moment to familiarize yourself with the various bounce types, their meanings, and how to address them. This will simplify the process of cleaning your lists and managing contacts.

Re-Engage Disengaged Contacts for Higher Open Rates

Some subscribers may become less engaged with your emails over time. They may feel overwhelmed by the volume of emails they receive, be too busy to read them, or their interests may have simply changed. So, how can we reach them?

• Segment your list: Identify disengaged subscribers by their lack of interaction with your emails and then use segmentation to create a targeted list.

• Create a reengagement campaign: Otherwise known as a winback campaign; review the content you’re sending and consider what could be changed or improved that might be of more interest to these disengaged subscribers. 

• Include a permission reminder: Remind subscribers why they signed up and give them the option to update their preferences or opt down to fewer emails, if you send different email campaigns at varying frequencies.

• Use A/B Testing: Send different variations of your winback campaign to see which performs best. This can help you refine your approach and increase the chances of reengagement.

Say Goodbye to Inactive Subscribers with Grace

If you still can’t woo them, it might be time to let them go. Send a final email giving them one, last chance to not break your heart and stay subscribed. If they don’t respond, then remove them from your list, pick up a quart of Cherry Garcia, and move on. Your sender reputation will thank you.