Do's and Dont's of List Selection
You have your perfect customer model and your ready to move forward with your email campaign. All you have to do is select the appropriate mailing lists to start your campaign, right? Don't you wish it was that easy. List selection is a combination of art and science. Therefore, as in our previous newsletters we have a list of list selection nuggets to help you make the job a little easier:
- How was the information for a particular list collected. Is the list an opt-in list. Opt-in lists, as a rule, perform much better than opt-out lists.
- How often is the list utilized. Lists that are extremely popular, may have a large number of recipients who suffer from email overload. The best question to ask is what percentage of the list is comprised of recent acquisitions. New members mean new and interested prospective customers
- Is the list exclusive to the list manager your dealing with. The less a list is passed around, the better the chances that its customers haven't been emailed too frequently.
- What kind of selectivity do you have with the list. The more you can filter a list to fit your customer model, the more cost effective your mailing becomes. However, remember selectivity comes at the cost of a smaller list
- What are the credentials of the list management company. Do they understand the technical and business aspects of email. There are a lot of people out there claiming to know what they are doing. You want to ensure that the list manager handling your email campaign knows how to send and track your campaign correctly.
- What kind of reporting and tracking is provided by the list manager. Just being able to send your emails is not enough. You need to, at the minimum, be able to track opens, deliveries and click throughs.