An email list can be as massive or as minuscule as you want. It doesn’t matter whether you’re sending 10,000 emails or 100,000—email list management is a must for all marketers.
Following email list management, best practices help you segment leads, create sustainable sales pipelines, and keep everything focused. We’re here to guide you through it. In this article, we’ll be going over:
- What is email list management
- How to sustain healthy email lists
- Email list management best practices to follow
What is Email List Management?
There’s a lot more to email marketing than just scheduling when to send an email. You have email nurturing, cold outreach, automated follow-ups, and much more.
All of these would fall into chaos without proper email list management. As your business grows, so does your customer base. To scale further, you’d need even more leads.
That’s thousands upon thousands of new emails. Email list management helps segment and categorize each, helping you sustain critical aspects of all business communications.
There should be an email list for prospects you need to nurture, customers to re-engage, and newsletter subscribers.
You’d also need an email list for prospecting, cold email outreach, or leads that just signed up for a free trial of your products/services.
The Importance of Email List Management
You run campaigns with an email list, pushing new prospects down the sales pipeline, but some don’t respond. This could be detrimental to your deliverability and sender reputation.
Following email list management best practices ensures we don’t have these issues. Instead, we get healthy, sustainable email lists.
What Makes a Healthy Email List?
Your email lists are healthy if the contacts in that list want to engage with you and want to hear more about what you have to offer. In most cases, you’d like to have a list that has:
- High deliverability rates: Aim for lists with more than 95% deliverability
- Low bounce rates: Keep bounce rates lower than 3%
- Consistent new subscribers
- Subscribers that actively opted-in to your email list
- Decent open rates: Available rates aren’t as crucial for most marketers nowadays.
Maintaining a “healthy” email list demands constant attention. We need to track key performance indicators and, most importantly, follow best practices for email list management.
Email List Management Best Practices
If you want healthy email lists, higher deliverability rates, and low bounce rates, follow these email list management best practices:
Clean Your Email Lists
It doesn’t make sense to keep uninterested people on your lists. Doing so will just negatively affect deliverability. Instead, remove or “clean” uninterested subscribers from your list.
You can also try sending these subscribers to a new email list for a “re-engagement” campaign. Some subscribers will not even bother clicking opt-out links in every email.
If they still don’t engage, remove them from your list manually. But if previously active subscribers stopped engaging, your emails could’ve been sent to the “promotions tab” instead.
Email List Segmentation
Email list management and segmentation go hand-in-hand. Segmenting your email list ensures you send the right emails to the right people.
You can segment email lists based on demographics, buying intent, user activity on your website, or even email open rates. Doing so allows you to create better personalized emails.
This allows you to hone in on the buyer personas or ideal customer profiles your SDRs should focus on. It also helps in tailoring more relevant content for your subscribers.
Focus on Improving Opt-Ins
Inbound marketing helps grow email lists through content optimized for opt-ins. Social media is excellent for this, but campaigns should redirect to lead capture pages.
Try creating pop-ups on key landing pages on your website, hosting contests or giveaways, or offering promos or discounts in exchange for contact information.
More importantly, your opt-ins should have a clear and actionable CTA that stands out. Let’s say you’re a service helping businesses improve their sales process.
Instead of saying, “Sign up for our newsletter,” your CTA could say, “Start improving your sales strategies today.”
Track Email Marketing Metrics
Maintaining and managing a healthy email list means monitoring key marketing metrics. For example, open rates could be used to segment interested vs non-interested leads.
Reply rates could be used to identify prospects with high buying intent. Meanwhile, conversion rates clearly indicate which email lists perform best with what email strategy.
You need the right email marketing tool, CRM, and analytics tool to track email marketing metrics. Instantly has all three!
Use Email Marketing Software
Instantly’s analytics dashboard has all the necessary KPIs to help you make informed, data-driven decisions. Leads can then be monitored through the Dealflow CRM, and of course, Instantly offers a wide variety of email automation features for every email list you create.
But if you’re entirely new to email marketing, you might want to brush up on the fundamental email marketing terms. This will help you navigate any email marketing tool you decide to use.
As a rule of thumb, you want an email marketing tool to automate follow-ups, send emails based on user behavior, and offer email warm-up capabilities.
That’s why we’d always recommend Instantly. It covers all the email marketing fundamentals, streamlines email list management, and has advanced features catering to even the most complex sales processes.
Key Takeaways
Email list management is crucial to developing sustainable sales pipelines. It boosts email deliverability, improves personalization, and helps maintain clean email lists.
To ensure you’re getting all these benefits and more, follow these email management best practices:
- Regularly clean email lists by removing inactive and uninterested leads.
- You can segment these uninterested leads into a re-engagement campaign. But removing them from your lists is best if they still don’t engage.
- Use double opt-ins to ensure subscribers are interested right from the start.
- Always track key email marketing metrics and actively monitor your email lists.
- Leverage automation and email marketing tools to streamline email list management.
When it comes to email list management, email automation, and everything in between, there’s no better partner than Instantly! Try it out today!