Email Hygiene Leads to Improved Customer Relations and Better Open Rates
Creating an informative and engaging email strategy for your business is an essential component of your marketing plan that, when executed well, can directly impact your bottom line. However, developing content that speaks to your list members also requires dedicated time and effort — and it can become frustrating to see little return on your investment in the form of higher open rates and engagement.
While it does take time to perfect your strategy, a change in perspective surrounding email list management might be the key to success. This article will explore the game-changing benefits of email hygiene for building strong customer relationships and improving email open rates, and introduce the industry-leading software tools that benefit email lists of all sizes.
Why is email list hygiene important?
Many business owners and marketers focus solely on growing their email lists and believe that the best way to reach as many interest groups as possible is to amass as large an email list as possible. However, there are serious consequences to this methodology that they may not be aware of.
Like a plant that needs pruning, email lists need consistent maintenance in order to grow. By cleaning out old email addresses, fake addresses, and those that have redirected your mail to spam, you ensure that an audience of interested list members is both receiving and opening your mail. The opposite is also true — by neglecting to clear out uninterested or non-deliverable addresses, you risk dragging down your sender reputation with lower click-through rates and open rates, as well as triggering high bounce rate (determined by emails that “bounce back” to the server without ever making it to their destination).
The surprising value of shortened email lists
The worse your sender reputation stands with email platforms, the more likely your mail will end up in spam folders across the board. Therefore, longer lists aren’t automatically better — a shorter list of consistently engaged and interactive list members is far more productive and far less risky than a big list that has been neglected for years.
Businesses should regularly remove inactive or invalid email addresses that have not opened any mail in a certain period of time (usually six months or more). During the time between cleanses, there are other ways to ensure their content is opened and read.
The email strategy motto: ease and specificity
List members likely have hundreds, even thousands, of emails arriving in their inboxes each year. Providing valuable, memorable content for list members has always been a top priority for companies looking to stand out and capture their audience with their emails. The need for digestible and specific information in email marketing has increased even more following the global pandemic, which has rightfully made internet users more careful of the content they consume online than ever before.
While continuously clearing out unresponsive email addresses from your lists is an essential practice.
Marketing strategies that land with list members
Whether you’re an entrepreneur looking to build a healthy email list from the start or an experienced organization with an email strategy decades in the making, there are several tools you can implement to make list members see the value of each email that arrives in their inbox.
- Segmented lists: Admail’s Smartgroups feature allows businesses to segment their email lists based on any number of factors for more specific content — including active openers, clickers, demographics, and geographic selection. In addition to their help in creating targeted audiences for your email content, Smartgroups are the most efficient way to find emails to scrub from your list for consistent email delivery and higher open rates.
- Responsive design: Admail’s responsive Email Builder tools allow organizations to craft emails that adjust to any screen size or device requirements, making email content more accessible for all list members and less likely to be scrolled past.
- Measuring results to modify lists: Business owners and marketers benefit from utilizing Accutrak, with in-depth statistics and reporting tools, that includes Opens, Click-throughs, Unsubscribes, Non-deliverable, and Attachment Downloads. Accutrack measures the results of the email campaigns so content and results can be measured. List Builder functions as a database storing, tracking, and automatically removing addresses that have bounced more than four times.
From email creation to tracking progress over time, Admail empowers organizations to manage their data efficiently.
Choose Admail for clean, efficient email lists
Admail is a trailblazer in the email list management industry, assisting business owners and marketers of all sizes for over 25 years. Our deep knowledge of email strategy stems from our presence during its introduction and its continued development into the marketing must-have it is today. With a full repertoire of tools to keep your email lists clean and functioning at their optimal capacity — and the best customer service around — Admail is prepared to guide your email strategy to its fullest potential.
When you’re ready to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, give the Admail team a call. Ask about our add-on email hygiene services and verification, or sign up for a 30-day free trial to get a taste of everything we have to offer. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for the next installment in this series on managing email data, where we’ll explore the benefits of suppressing problematic email domains.