The Whitelist

When a Dirty In-House Email List Costs the ISPs Money, It’s Time to Clean Up!

If your in-house email list hasn’t had a good scrubbing lately, it’s time to clean house. A clean list has always ranked high among email marketing best practices, but now even more so as ISPs crack down on email marketers who waste their time…and their money.

As an email marketing agency focused on numbers and deliverability, we understand that it’s hard to see the size of your list shrink when bad or dormant email addresses get removed. It’s worth it though. Remember, your goal is a quality list, not a quantity one. You’re far better off with 5,000 names that respond to your content than 15,000 that don’t.

Scrubbing your in-house email list might mean fewer names, but it also means higher ROI from your email marketing because you’re marketing to a more responsive audience. In addition, you’re improving your email delivery rate by improving your sending reputation. And you’re pleasing the ISPs, who are the ultimate gatekeepers between you and your prospects.

ISPs still see emailing to bad and inactive addresses as sloppy and careless on the part of the marketer, and they will be more likely to flag your emails as spam if you continue to do so. But now we’re seeing the major ISPs thinking of these unnecessary emails as an expense too. If you’re already annoying an ISP because you’re carelessly sending to people who haven’t responded to your emails in over a year—showing an obvious lack of interest in your content—imagine how annoyed they’ll be when they think of those wasted emails as costing them money to boot?

The answer was and still is good list hygiene. Start with email marketing best practices that require an opt-in. Use a Preference Center to give subscribers control. Then keep your list squeaky clean with regular scrubbings.

Your list will be clean, your subscribers responsive and the ISPs pleased. What more could you ask for?

Get tips for scrubbing your in-house email list.

How to Build Your List

As an email marketer, you’re always looking to add more names to your email list. But as with many things in life, we sometimes get too focused on quantity over quality.

Which doesn’t sound like a problem in the world of email marketing, until you realize a list based on quantity will decrease your email marketing ROI and even negatively impact your email deliverability rate.

In our last post, we wrote about the benefits to culling your list for more email marketing ROI. But let’s get back to basics and talk about list building.

For a list that will yield valuable email marketing ROI, you have to focus on a quality list (which doesn’t always correlate to quantity).

Do:

• Have something of value to offer in exchange for their email address. Think of it as a quid pro quo exchange. Everyone wins, if you do it right.
• Sell your email signups: Make the reason to sign up for your emails compelling. Don’t just ask for an email address without specifying why.
• Ask people to sign up in multiple locations: Where do you have a web presence besides your website? Make sure an email sign-up link or box is available and visible everywhere.
• Offer great content that people will share. This will lead to more sign-ups (and keep your current subscribers)!

On the other hand,

Don’t:

• Add everyone your company comes into contact with to your database.
• Use sweepstakes that get you plenty of names from people who want to win…but who never want to hear from you again.
• Use third-party or co-registration techniques.

It might not be the fastest way to a massive list, but the list you’ll end up with will be full of subscribers who want to hear from you.

Make sure you remember that behind every email address is a person. Who values their privacy, and guards their information fiercely. Maintain their trust by delivering what you promised, and thank them for subscribing to your emails!

More People Subscribe to Your In-House Email List When Engaged

Looking through some old notes, I came across this MarketingSherpa chart from May showing the most effective tactics for growing your in-house email list.

It resonated anew with me today because of the response to a post published by our CEO at the Email Critic blog.  Marco’s post argued for having more than a simple sign up box on your website for encouraging subscriptions. At ClickMail we encourage our email marketing clients to remember that an email address has value. To get the email address, you must offer something in exchange. That’s one reason for suggesting businesses do more than simply have a signup box on their website.

This MarketingSherpa chart says kind of the same thing, if you look at the numbers. Out of the 10 tactics survey respondents could choose from, the top four have something in common. Let’s call it engagement. Each of the top four methods for legitimately acquiring an email address involves the subscriber engaging with the organization at some level. The top four tactics according to the survey are:

1.    Signing up when making a purchase

2.    Submitting an email address in order to get a download

3.    Submitting an email address to register for an online event

4.    Signing up when at a tradeshow

With the first three, the subscriber is getting something. And I suspect with the fourth, they are as well, as tradeshow booths usually have giveaways and raffles to entice people to sign up for emails. And that’s email marketing best practices, to offer something of value to the potential subscriber so they see it as a fair exchange and they sign up.

The two least effective tactics? Social sharing and forward-to-a friend. Neither of these offers any kind of engagement with your organization at all. Hence the difference. You must offer both as part of your email marketing best practices! But this chart shows you can’t rely on them alone, any more than you can rely on a simple signup box alone on your website.

More Email Marketing Best Practices for Building Email Lists

Check out this dialog between a group of noteworthy email marketing experts for advice on building your permission-based, in-house email list. Each has a different point of view, but it’s interesting to note recurring themes…OK, it’s not interesting, it’s critical knowledge.

Throughout this dialog (and not including the sales pitches), there are three points made repeatedly that we should pay attention to:

1) Content that rocks. Admittedly, no one uses that phrase “content that rocks” in this post, but that’s the sum of it. When your content is awesome, when it rocks, when it excites, people share it and that grows your list. It also attracts people who want a piece of that compelling content when they are on your website or at your establishment and they see your promise, the carrot of content you dangle before them. Relevant, targeted, engaging and compelling content is now and long has been an email best practice. Even if this means you must hire an outside copywriter to help, make compelling content a high priority.

2) Search! Meaning organic search for organic growth of your list. You use search marketing to get the traffic to your website. Visitors like what they see, and they also like the promise of compelling content (see #1 above) so they sign up for your emails. Voila! List growth! You’re not using search marketing directly to grow your list; you’re using it to grow your site traffic. But the side benefit of that is more people to pitch your email signup to.

3) Making social part of the effort. Asking for email signups at every point of contact means social too, and it could be that someone is more likely to end up at your Facebook page than your website anyway.

The experts discuss other techniques such as using ECOA to update email addresses, but I’ll leave that detail for you to read if you’re interested. Really the main takeaways from an email marketing best practices perspective are great content, using search and using social.

I should also point out that the post starts out talking about a responsive list, meaning all of this advice is geared towards building a list based on quality, not quantity. And that’s the kind of list that’s going to deliver the ROI.

Improve Email Delivery With Good Dental Hygiene Practices

The other day after getting the mail I mumbled something about “list hygiene” in front of my 12-year-old. She asked, “What’s list hygiene?” I was holding a piece of junk mail that should never have shown up in our mailbox. Now I can’t remember why, but it was a classic example of a mailing list being woefully out of date and a business wasting time, money and paper on a bad address when they didn’t need to.

As I explained to my daughter about list hygiene and how really it’s an email marketing best practices term, I was just using it for the snail mail, she said, “You mean it’s like going to the dentist.” She heard list hygiene and thought of dental hygiene…and she was right on with her analogy.

I asked her to elaborate, and together we developed my new favorite analogy for improving email delivery.

Improving email delivery is like taking care of your teeth. List hygiene keeps your list scrubbed and cleaned just like dental hygiene does for your teeth and gums. It must be thorough, like flossing, to really work. If you don’t do the hygiene, you get cavities…the email marketing equivalent of bounced emails and spam reports that will get you graylisted then blacklisted. (Picture a cavity as gray. That’s your mailing list without proper hygiene.) And that’s going to hurt your email deliverability big time! Just like a big cavity hurts!

Hygiene is something you pay attention to on a regular basis, and pay extra special attention to a few times a year. Twice daily we brush, once daily we floss, and every six months we go in for the kind of scrubbing and cleaning that only a dental hygienist can do. At that time, we also have the dentist look things over and make sure our pearly whites are still doing A-OK.

Your in-house email list should be cleaned on a regular basis, and maybe that includes a plan for reactivating dormant email addresses too, like using teeth whitener for even prettier teeth. Then periodically you should meet with an email deliverability consultant (aka the dentist) for expert help and to make sure your email deliverability best practices are keeping your list as clean as can be.

If your hygiene could use a boost to improve email deliverability, make ClickMail your email deliverability consultant.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Shocking Proof Quality Is More Important Than Quantity!

It’s an email marketing best practice we harp on a lot in this blog, I know. But that’s because it’s an idea that’s so steadfastly adhered to, this idea that more names on your email list means more profit. No, it doesn’t.

Do you need shocking proof that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to your in-house email list? Then click on through to this MarketingSherpa case study. The Indianapolis Symphony cut their email database by almost 96%! And turned their email marketing program around as a result, doubling their online sales by focusing on the people who did want to hear from them and forgetting about those who didn’t.

If your in-house email list had unresponsive names and performed poorly, could you cut your list by 10%? 30%? 50%? If it meant you’d increase your response rates and conversions? Could you do it?

It’s a scary thought, isn’t it! Even if we know intellectually it’s among email marketing best practices! For email marketers, those email addresses can be like currency, money in the bank. But they’re only money in the bank if they’re responding to your emails and buying from your company, right?

I once read, “Would you rather have one client who pays you what you’re worth or two clients who don’t?” And every single time I have asked someone that question, they have without any hesitation whatsoever answered, “the one client who pays me what I’m worth.”

Think of your in-house email list the same way: Would you rather have a list of 10,000 names that don’t respond to your email marketing campaigns? Or 2,000 that do? When the symphony was willing to slash their list down to only those who opted in to the re-engagement emails, they were brave! They were bold! And they were rewarded! Through careful list building since that time, they’ve grown their in-house email list more than 500%. And that’s a quality list, not a quantity one, chockfull of people who want to hear from the symphony, who want to receive the email newsletters and buy tickets to the concerts.

Was it a gamble? It sounds like one when you’re talking 96%! Did it pay off? It sure sounds like it!

Could your in-house email list use a purging? Would your email marketing staff be able to do it? Let us know if you need some help.