Don't make these 4 mistakes with email lists

It’s a story for the ages. Marketers often speak to their ability to use the almighty email to augment multi-tiered campaigns, engage and re-engage subscribers and boost their well-optimized landing pages. What they don’t typically speak about are all the failed attempts it took to get there.

Crafting email lists of loyal and engaged subscribers is difficult and takes time, and there are several mistakes that can happen along the way. Developing the perfect, most-effective email campaign is a challenge, but your email campaigns have no chance of succeeding if your email lists are not in their best shape. Taking the right steps to develop clean, up-to-date email lists and maintain high data quality will go a long way toward maximizing the potential of any email campaign.

The top 4 email list mistakes

Email marketing is a powerful tool, but just a few mistakes with developing and maintaining an email list can completely derail even the best efforts. Even worse, certain mistakes can cost money and your sending reputation, making it crucial to avoid taking the wrong steps. The following are some of the biggest email marketing mistakes businesses can make.

1. Not regularly verifying your email list

Time is the enemy of your email database. Email list databases can decay over 20 percent each year due to people changing their personal or work emails, abandoning old email addresses they no longer use, or opting out of your email communications. Because email lists can be so volatile, taking steps to maintain email hygiene is crucial.

In some instances, the email address may work but additional email list hygiene mistakes may compromise your campaign. Over time, it is also common for your database to build up incorrect or incomplete information. As information is entered into your database, it is possible for typos to happen or fields to be left incomplete. If customers receive emails that have their birthday listed incorrectly, their name spelled wrong or their address formatted incorrectly, it can affect their experience. Because customers appreciate personalized emails, these inaccuracies can harm your campaign’s effectiveness.

In order to make sure you’re using only the most updated and complete information in your campaigns and communication outreach, verify your email list regularly.

2. Not segmenting your email list

Assuming that all your customers may be interested in the same messaging, even within a niche industry, is a costly assumption. A lot of email marketers make the mistake of not segmenting their email database based on characteristics they've gleaned from their customers, like interests, demographics or industries.

Segmenting lists will not only help you craft more personalized and relevant messages to your customers but also can result in a big payoff when done right. The most common benefits gained from list segmentation are increased open rates, lower opt-out or unsubscribe rates, and better deliverability.

Getting started with email list segmentation can be overwhelming, but these are the three most important points to help you get started.

Define your data points - Segmentation isn't possible without customer data, and the data that's needed will differ for different companies. For example, if you're a B2B company, job role, industry, location and company size may be important questions to ask your customer.
Create personas for your customers - Identifying your best customers using buyer personas, whether they be families with toddlers, young professionals or sports fanatics, is essential to help you define which segments need which message.
Choose your segments - When you understand who your best customer is, you can begin crafting emails to target them. Be mindful of the voice and language you have in the emails. For example, younger demographics will likely respond better to more informal language than older demographics.
Test and measure results - Make sure you're measuring how people engage with your emails. Test how using different subject lines, different language and different images make a difference in open rates, click-through rates and further engagement rates.

3. Sending emails without permission

There’s a reason why those email lists are up for sale; their recipients have probably been spammed to oblivion and the value of those addresses are next to nothing. Buying or renting email lists also means that those people haven’t signed up to receive any sort of communication from you and reaching out to them can put you on the naughty list.

What do we mean by that? Well, there are dedicated mechanisms set up to combat email spam. Honeypots and other spam traps are planted email addresses. When these addresses are mailed to, they expose marketers with bad list management practices that will hurt their sender reputation, which affects the likelihood of emails reaching the inbox. Plus, sending emails to senders who did not opt-in violates the CAN-SPAM Act and can lead to big fines.

Instead of taking the easy route to get a lot of emails fast, use the tried-and-true way of building up your email list database. You’re guaranteed to have higher quality leads and the best part is, those people are actually expecting emails from you, so you won’t get reported for having unsavory email practices. Some ways to grow your email list and develop leads organically include:

Pop-ups: Pop-ups are a great way to increase your mailing list, especially when combined with a discount or a free piece of content upon signing up as they encourage users to share their emails.
Sticky menu bars: The idea behind a “sticky” menu bar is to have the “subscribe” or “register” call-to-action (CTA) follow them throughout their scrolling activity. A word of caution, aesthetics matter. Colors that are too jarring or bars that are too large will lower user experience and can drive them off your site altogether.
In-content CTA: Insert a CTA box in the body of your content, or at the end, to give readers a new step in their user journey. For example, if someone is reading a landing page, you can put a CTA box in the content since they would likely make a quality subscriber.

4. Ignoring feedback from your subscribers

We assume that you want to be a good email marketer who follows all of the email best practices. In fact, getting the highest quality leads into your databases depends upon it. It’s very important to listen to email recipients when they mark your emails as spam or junk. Why? User complaints have a huge impact on your sender reputation and if you are receiving a lot of negative feedback, you may need to change the expectations you're setting with users about the frequency of your messages or the content they will be receiving.

Be sure to monitor feedback loops. Feedback loops are a means for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to flag email marketers who are abusing their privileges, but now they are also available to those who just want to take a proactive approach to managing email list hygiene and gain insights into what may be negatively affecting their email campaigns.

Additionally, make sure to keep the unsubscribe link easy to find so users can opt-out of receiving your messages. This helps you maintain a list of subscribers that wants and engages with your content, strengthening your feedback loops.

Avoid making mistakes by maintaining data quality

Keeping your email list database clean is a worthwhile but challenging initiative. Not only should there be careful monitoring of inactive or outdated subscribers, making sure that you implement best practices like not purchasing email lists, monitoring recipient complaints and segmenting your customer database are all steps to bear in mind to make sure you don’t make costly email list mistakes.

Fortunately, Experian Data Quality can help you make the process simpler. Our email verification tools are designed to help you keep your lists clean and monitor inactive and outdated emails. Avoid email marketing mistakes and bounced emails by ensuring that your database contains only the most useful data. Contact us today to learn more!

*Originally published by Shirley Zhao