Intro
We all have had busy periods in our lives, especially when business is booming and you are short-handed or juggling too many tasks. However, this is no excuse to neglect the health of your mailing list. As with most online businesses these days, your mailing list health directly correlates with your business profitability.
What do you mean by healthy list?
When you have a healthy list, any email marketing campaign performed using that mailing list should ideally give you certain statistics like:
- Getting a bounce rate of less than 5%.
- Maintaining an open rate of at least 20%.
- Achieving a click-through rate of 18% or higher.
- Low unsubscribe rate of 0.5% or below.
The numbers above are just guidelines, they may vary depending on your industry. The above numbers are also just for marketing emails. Transactional emails will have their own set of numbers which we are not concerned with as the volume of transactional emails is generally much lower than marketing emails.
Factors affecting the health of your email list
Based on the 4 criteria we have mentioned above, below are the steps to achieve the goals. We will address them in the order of importance from the highest to the lowest.
- Keeping your bounce rate low
- Practice ethical marketing by going with double opt-in. This is also good for complying with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- Regularly clean your mailing list with an email validation service like MailboxValidator’s bulk validation to remove outdated email addresses.
- Check your Email Service Provider’s (ESP) metric after each campaign and immediately unsubscribe those emails with hard bounces.
- Maintaining a good open rate
- Send your marketing newsletters out on a regular basis to keep your branding fresh in the minds of your readers. They are more likely to open your email when they recognize the sender.
- Perform re-engagement campaigns for those users that have low open rates. If they still don’t respond, then it’s better to unsubscribe them.
- Achieving a good click-through rate
- Your readers are probably a varied bunch with different interests. Group them into segments with customized email contents based on what they like.
- Making sure your unsubscribe rate stays low
- Once your reader has chosen to unsubscribe, respect their decision and don’t send them any more emails.
Conclusion
All the time and efforts spent on maintaining a healthy list will give you better returns on investment (ROI) over the long run. This will increase your conversion and help you to grow your business even more.
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