The Whitelist

Growing a significant email list doesn’t just happen instantly: email marketers know better than anyone else that it takes time and energy. But all that effort goes to waste if your email marketing campaigns don’t continually engage and interest your hard-won subscribers. Ensuring that you maintain your focus on creating interesting and relevant copy not only keeps subscribers interested in what you have to say, it also helps your email deliverability rates.

To keep your subscribers opening, reading, clicking through, and converting make sure you listen to their preferences as they stated them in the preference center they used to sign up. You use a preference center, right? Okay, just making sure. We’ve talked time and again about the importance of email preference centers to your email deliverability rate and overall reputation, and how using an email preference center should be one of your email deliverability tools!

But once they’ve signed up and told you what they’d like to hear from you, make sure that you honor your end of the bargain by doing the following:

Tell them what to expect. By using an email preference center and confirmation messages to provide an overview of your program, subscribers will understand when to expect your emails, and what to expect from them (discounts, newsletters, or helpful tips).

Fulfill their expectations. If they signed up for bi-weekly messages, make sure that you have that system in place and stick to it. No more, no less! Your subscribers will feel respected when their expectations are met, and they won’t, if they aren’t.

Send relevant content. We’ve also talked a good amount about the email deliverability benefits to segmenting your lists. Once you have relevant data, you can send increasingly targeted and relevant content to your subscribers. And the more targeted your content, the more engaged your subscribers.

For Email Deliverability, Sometimes Less (on your Lists) Means More

So, you’ve crossed all your email marketing t’s and dotted all your email marketing best practices i’s with a targeted, relevant offer sent only to subscribers who opted in to your campaigns.

Then you learn a major ISP has blocked your IP address due to spam complaints. Before you know it, your email deliverability is plummeting and you can’t get an accurate sense for how effective your email marketing campaign was.

How could this be? Your subscribers opted-in, after all!

Well, the reasons are multiple-fold. Sometimes, an email subscriber will forget opting in and rather than clicking “Unsubscribe,” they may just opt to hit that pesky “report spam” button, without an awareness that your beautifully crafted email marketing message is indeed a message they chose to receive. The reasons behind this have a lot to do with failing to obey email marketing best practices (and listening to your subscribers’ preferences) in the first place. (But that’s another blog post). In the meantime, your email deliverability starts to suffer.

The best thing to do now is to take a good hard look at your email list, take a deep breath, and start cutting. It’s hard. You don’t want to voluntarily trim the increasingly large (and growing) subscriber list you’ve worked so hard to cultivate with all of your email marketing genius. Oftentimes, making a cut can yield higher email deliverability rates. In the case of email deliverability, it’s not always quantity that matters. Consider focusing certain ad campaigns only on subscribers who have made a purchase. In other similar case studies, this strategy has consistently yielded close to 100% inbox delivery. If you need help with list segmentation, you’re in luck! We covered it in detail in our September issue of the ClickMail Marketer!

Emailing to fewer, but more engaged, subscribers can be the difference between $0 and generating a return on investment from the subscribers who really are interested in your email marketing messages. Because the other alternative is that your valuable customers may never see your email due to failed email deliverability.

In navigating today’s world of email marketing and email deliverability, be prepared to face the choice between reaching some valuable customers, or reaching no customers at all.

List Segmentation for Big Payoffs

In the fast moving world of email marketing, if your email marketing messages are specific and relevant to your subscribers’ individual needs, your email marketing campaign will stand out from the rest. And it’s impossible to attain targeted messaging and individual relevance with just one message that goes out to one big list. This means it’s time to segment your lists by one or more grouping options like demographic and/or interest.

It might seem like a huge challenge to segment your list but it doesn’t have to be. In the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer, we outline the top grouping options for optimal list segmentation, and give you reasons why these options are among the most effective. After all, the main purpose of list segmentation is to yield a highly relevant and targeted email campaign, which means a better sender reputation for you! And having a good sender reputation leads to increased email deliverability, more email opens, higher click-through rates, enhanced customer loyalty, decreased unsubscribes, and increased sales. In other words, everything you want out of your email marketing campaigns.

If you’re not sure how to get started with your list segmentation strategy or implementation, check out the September issue of the ClickMail Marketer. And if it still sounds difficult (or if you’d rather not take it on yourself), let ClickMail help. ClickMail can even point you towards ESP options that enable list segmentation. List segmentation is an investment now that will definitely pay off later. Find out how to get started in the September ClickMail Marketer.