Email Best and Worst Practices

Even while you are in the process of building your website you can be working on building an email list. Email Lists and Mailing lists (email lists) are the key factors to a successful marketing program. So, you have a beautiful website, whether you hired it out or built it yourself. It won’t do you much good, however, in building your business if there is no way to let people know you even exist.

Email lists form a very integral part of any email marketing campaign. Such lists are extremely useful as they can help you turn your venture into a profitable investment. With time, you can expect people in your list to be loyal to you. However, for a successful email marketing campaign, there are a few dos and don’ts that you should keep in mind when you’re building and maintaining an email list.

Best

• Use a double opt-in email list

There is a great deal of spam floating about the Internet and growing exponentially. Internet service providers and email service spam filters have taken measures to deal with this problem. As a responsible email marketer, you would be better served to offer a double opt-in choice that confirms recipients really want to receive your email. A double opt-in list is the best way to create a high-quality email list. Moreover, it will ensure that all your email communication passes the first, and often biggest, hurdle—getting into your prospect’s mailbox

• Segment your email list

Leverage the greatest advantage of email marketing campaigns—targeted communication. Most email marketing services empower you to divide lists according to demographics, customer likes and dislikes and much more. This is extremely useful if you have a large and diverse customer base because it helps you to speak to each target group in a tone and manner that will appeal to them. People appreciate a marketer who takes the trouble to speak their language.

• Clean your email lists

An often-forgotten email list management practice is cleaning. While it seems like a low priority item that you can put on the back burner, it’s something in which every email marketer must invest some time. I clean my lists every six months, in an effort to delete those emails that have had no activity or bounce each time they are contacted. It is much better to have a list that enjoys high rates of responses than one that is huge with a low percentage of responses After all, a clean list not only saves time, it also saves money, especially if you are paying to send it out.

Worst

• Don’t rent or buy email lists, ever!

As a responsible and credible email marketer, this is one thing you should absolutely, categorically, definitely never do, unless of course you want to be labelled a spammer. While buying or renting lists may seem like a time-saving strategy in the short-term, it will most certainly come back to haunt you later. The idea of a good email campaign is to reach out to people who will buy your products or sign up for your services. Bought and rented lists often give you a bunch of prospects who will probably never open your email. Worse still, your domain may end up being blacklisted by email and internet service providers rendering your entire email campaign futile.

• Don’t forget to put a subscribe box on your website

Make it easy for folks to opt in for your email campaigns. Prominently place a subscribe box on your website so visitors can sign up if they see value in the information you are providing. Look for a provider that offers an easily customizable signup form that automatically adds the addresses to your email list. Needless to say, it’s a great way of building a high-quality email list.

• Don’t lose patience

Email list building and management can be a time-consuming task initially. Once you’ve put some processes in place, however, you’re sure to reap the benefits of higher open rates, better responses and a healthier bottom line with a well-maintained email list.

• A word about grammar in your content

Please make every effort to write as well as you can and to have others look at what you have written, especially if you are just beginning as a writer.

As with most things this list is just a starting point. Next time we’ll look at site platforms that use templates to get you up and running.