There are a lot of challenges to overcome when starting a new mailing list. Getting people to subscribe is one of the first challenges you face as you start a new mailing list. You then need to send quality content out to keep subscribers interested. On top of that, it is important to keep track of the mailing list to maintain its effectiveness.
It is clear that a mailing list isn’t a one-time thing. Maintenance is just as important as the setup process, especially if you want to get great results from having an effective mailing list. There are several things you need to know about keeping your mailing list effective in the long run.
Maintain a Healthy List
Maintaining a healthy mailing list is an important step to add to your maintenance routine. You need to be extra certain that the recipients currently in your list are recipients that actually get the emails you send. There is no room for invalid addresses and bad recipients. You also want to screen for recipients that no longer interact with the emails you send.
The main reason why maintaining a healthy list is important is cost. The more emails you send, the longer it takes for the newsletter system to send them all, and the more expensive it is to send those emails. Keeping a healthy list allows you to keep the cycle at its optimum rate.
Fortunately, the best newsletter solutions like SendinBlue now offer tools to help you automate most of the email list cleaning. These tools are designed to identify and automatically remove bad email addresses from your list. They can also track user engagement and other metrics to help you optimize your mailing list even further.
Manage Bounce Email
Speaking of automating mailing list cleaning, the email solution you use should also be able to detect undelivered emails and details about them. There are several types of bounce email and bounce codes that go along with them. Being able to identify the bounce codes and take the necessary action automatically will help make the whole task of maintaining an effective mailing list easier to handle.
When an email address or a recipient is temporarily unavailable (such as when they forget to renew their domain name for a few days) instant removal from the list is not the answer. Instead, the system must be able to place that email address on hold for further review. In the case of a permanent bounce, on the other hand, further review is not needed.
Tracking bounce and using an email system that knows how to tell different bounce codes apart will help keep your mailing list healthy in the long run. ISPs and email providers track the number of attempts made to send emails to a bad address, so avoiding this situation will keep your mailing list safe from being blacklisted.
Track User Engagement
The next part of mailing list maintenance is maintaining user engagement. You can’t expect to get great results from the mailing list when users aren’t really interacting with your email. Modern email systems have the ability to identify active users and put them as priorities, allowing you to maintain engaged users more effectively.
At the same time, you can use various strategies to re-engage users who aren’t interacting with your emails. Offering special discounts, for instance, can help attract old subscribers that haven’t opened your emails for a while. You can also run surveys or polls, offer bonuses, or host a contest for email subscribers only.
The data you gather while tracking user engagement also tells a lot about the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. Are you sharing the right content with the audience? Are your emails tailored to the specific audience groups you’re targeting? The more you know about your audience, the more you can cater to their needs and preferences.
Work on Credibility
Last but not least, invest in maintaining the credibility of your mailing list. This is an important element of mailing list maintenance that many often neglect. Existing subscribers aren’t going to promote your newsletter to others when they are not happy with the state of your newsletter. New subscribers also won’t be joining the newsletter when they see a lot of existing subscribers complaining about it.
There are several factors that affect the credibility of your mailing list. The number of emails you send (frequency) and how easy it is to unsubscribe (user-friendliness) are the two most important ones. Make sure you don’t end up flooding subscribers with emails and that you make unsubscribing as easy as possible – no more than two steps – to maintain the credibility of your newsletter.
The rest is about delivering quality content and added value that the recipients actually love. When you have a well-maintained mailing list, this is the easy part of the process.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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