An email list of names and email addresses used to send emails to multiple recipients. Growing your email list is a struggle because it will naturally decay over time, as people change jobs, email addresses are abandoned and people opt out because of various reasons.
You should always be striving to grow your list with the right kind of audience and you should also be carefully cleaning your list.
Here are 10 top tips for growing and maintaining a clean email list:
1. Verify Your List Accuracy Regularly
Voila Norbert’s email verifying tool helps check that the email addresses on your list are correct and up-to-date. This helps keep your sender score high so that you stay in the inbox and out of the spam folder.
2. Clean Up Your Language
Words like ‘buy’, ‘free’, ‘apply now’, ‘bargain’, ‘lowest price’ etc., should be avoided if possible because they are known spam filter trigger words also avoid including large images and attachments in your emails.
3. Make the Sign Up simple
- Sign-up forms ought to be all over your website, at the top and bottom of pages, articles and in pop-ups.
- A statement in your emails asking people to sign up is required.
- Create paper forms or provide tablets for people to sign up at trade shows or events.
4. Pump Up Your Content Creation
Put out high-quality content that your ideal audience would definitely find relevant and useful. This helps you attract attention from social media sites or Google results. Once they are on your page, you can offer a premium offer in exchange for their email address.
5. Deploy the Double Opt-in
Ensure subscribers are real and interested in having them confirm in their inbox that they are willing to sign up. The double opt-in can help, but the quality of the email list is more important than its size.
6. Always Encourage Sharing
Add a call-to-action at the end of every email asking people to share your content. When you’re putting out good content it will make people naturally want to share it.
7. Focus on Creating Remarkable Content
You should put out quality content if you want people to look forward to your emails.
8. Revitalize Your Stale List Through Opt-in Campaigns
The email should make it clear that those who don’t respond will be removed. While it looks complicated to remove people in order to grow, it serves the purpose of cleaning your list to only include interested subscribers.
9. Take the Time to Scrub Your List for Errors
Clean up errors like dave@yaoo.com and leslie@gmailcom.
Remove any mass distribution email addresses such as postmaster@somecompany.com or any email with the word spam.
10. Get Some Critical Feedback
Try sending out polls to gauge
Ask for feedback at the end of every email or at least periodically.
Ask contacts to set some communication preferences, such as topics of interest and preferred frequency.
Ask questions within the unsubscribe option to see if they might prefer different content or a different frequency.
