As an email marketer, you don’t always have the time to learn and implement every best-practice out there. However, here are three tips you should follow to quickly manage your email lists for better results.
If you are manually updating a single subscriber at a time, it can take a long time to update your lists. Instead, save yourself a lot of work by updating your whole list with the click of a single button. Most email marketing platforms will let you upload your full list of data and update the information associated with each subscriber.
For example, if you want to update everyone who renewed their membership, first make a list in Excel of all your renewals. Add one column with their email address, and another column with the value “Y” for yes, they’re a member, or “N” for no, they’re no longer a member. Save your list and then import it to your email marketing platform. With one simple import, you’ll quickly update everyone on the list with the most up-to-date information.
Also, you can talk to your IT administrator to see if it would be possible to automatically sync the data between your internal database and your email marketing platform. Common solutions with your email marketing platform are an API integration, FTP Imports, or a Salesforce Integration. This type of setup may take a little bit of work to setup, but will be a huge time saver in the long run. Imagine never having to manually update subscribers in your email marketing platform: that sounds great to me!
Each subscriber is unique in their interests and therefore will respond differently to emails. Create dynamic lists that pull in subscribers based on their location, interests, or demographics. This can help you target specific sub-groups with targeted emails, which will help increase the open and click rates for the campaign.
Now, what if you’d like to segment your lists, but you currently don’t have enough personal information about your subscribers? There are a couple things you can do to glean information from your subscribers:
Instead of only offering the ability to unsubscribe from all emails, why not let subscribers choose the lists they would like to be on? It’s time to let subscribers pick and choose the types of emails they’d like to receive. Email marketing platforms typically provide a profile center where subscribers can edit their subscription information. Subscribers can access this page by clicking a “Profile Center” link in your email footer. Simply decide the categories of mailings you typically send, or the specific lists who typically receive messages from you. Then make these category lists public and editable on the profile center.
