The Complete Guide to Email List Maintenance

You’ve done it! After years and years of dreaming, you’ve finally started your email list. You have subscribers, and you’re making content.

It’s a dream come true.

Wait, what’s that? You haven’t cleaned out your list in how long? Have you preformed your email list maintenance?

Email list maintenance is extremely important. If you haven’t cleaned out your email list in the last year, now is the time. You need to build and maintain an email list out of subscribers who actually care about and want to interact with your content.

To learn more about how to build an email list that will bolster your email marketing campaign, keep reading our 7 tips for your email list maintenance.

1. Make New Subscribers Feel Welcome

When a new subscriber signs onto your email list, they should feel personally welcomed by you. It should be like an invitation to come inside and take a seat.

One of the best ways to ensure that they get this feeling instantly is to set up automated emails. An automated email is an email that is sent automatically when someone does whatever the triggering action you set is.

For example, if you set an automated email to go out whenever someone subscribes, that email that you designated to be sent out will be sent to whoever subscribes to your list. Simple, right?

That person that just subscribed is immediately greeted with an introductory email. But, what should you include in your introductory email?

Let’s review. Your introductory email is extremely important, so you should take your time and include as much as you can:

• Incorporate heavy branding associated with your business
• Start with a greeting specific to that individual (use their name)
• Add a “thank you” for subscribing
• Ask them to add your email to their address book so that you can avoid the spam folder
• Include new content and extremely popular older content
• Direct them to your newest products/services
• Detail how many emails they can expect and when they can expect them
• Explain what kind of content you’re going to be covering in this email list
• Provide contact information
• Allow them to edit their subscription options
• Place an option to unsubscribe

With all of these details, your subscriber will be blown away. In fact, including all of this information will make your subscriber feel as if they’re already part of your brand’s family.

Plus, it starts them off with a great introduction to your brand which gets them excited for what’s to come. They’re already invested!

2. Allow Subscribers to Choose Email Frequency

Recently, businesses and other brands have been allowing their subscribers to choose their email frequency. This personalizes your subscriber’s experience and ensures that they are less likely to be annoyed at your posts. Both are good things because it increases their interest in your business as well as increasing engagement in your email list.

Your analytics will improve drastically by giving your subscribers this freedom. This improves your email list overall.

Be sure to consistently offer the choice in email frequency. You want to be honest and open about your emails. In fact, you’ll gain your subscribers’ respect by consistently offering this option. Your subscribers will enjoy that you’re allowing them to have more control over their inboxes, especially if you’re a smaller brand.

Now, you may be wondering what frequencies you should offer. Usually, companies offer three main subscription frequencies:

1. The complete package – every email, including release announcements, sales, personal messages, company updates, and more (emails up to two or three times a week)
2. The important stuff – every important email, including big releases and sales (emails about once a week)
3. The essentials – just the minor details to keep up with the company, including collection drops and major announcements (emails about once a month)

For that last option, many companies just make an entirely different list. To compose ‘the essentials,’ they’ll make a summary of all of the emails that happened that month. It’s like a digest of every email that they missed.

Speaking of different email lists, let’s touch on that.

3. Offer Different Email Lists

These days, companies are segmenting their email lists by allowing customers to sign up for different ones. By giving your subscriber the option to choose their favorite email list(s), you’re giving them more autonomy in how they’re going to interact with your company. Because they’re the ones choosing, they’re more likely to enjoy and soak in the content.

But, what kind of email lists should you make, you may ask. Well, that depends on the broad subject that you’re covering on your website.

For example, if you’re a social media manager, you may be talking about everything from YouTube to Pinterest. So, you can make different email lists targeting the different social media sites you talk about. Not every single subscriber is going to be interested in every single social media account, so you can differentiate and let your subscribers choose what content they get.

You can split up just about any subject into tinier topics that certain people may want to learn about. Sit down and think about what smaller niches lie within your current niche.

4. Keep Your Email List Clean

Don’t let your list become cluttered. Keep it clean.

There are a few tricks to ensuring that your list stays fresh as people enter and exit over the years:

• Remove any duplicate email addresses
• Remove or fix any email addresses that have typos
• Update or remove invalid email addresses
• Delete email addresses from emails that bounce back

You should review your email list at least every couple of months to ensure that everything is updated. If you don’t keep your list updated, you could see a decrease in your analytic numbers.

Of course, this decrease won’t be accurate. But, in order to have an accurate representation of how your emailing list is going, you need to keep your numbers accurate.

Keeping your email list clean also helps you identify your loyal subscribers. Using your engagement rate, you can identify loyal customers and reward them.

5. Reengage Old Subscribers

Even after going through and refreshing your emailing list, we’re sure that you still have a few stragglers. You have a much more concentrated list now, but it’s not perfect.

It’s likely that you’re left with some subscribers who haven’t opened an email in a year. They aren’t helping your engagement rate and they’re likely just deleting your emails.

You have two options when you’re faced with this predicament: 

1. You can remove these individuals from your emailing list
2. You can reengage these individuals

By “reengage,” we mean that you can encourage your inactive subscribers to become active again. By sending a coupon code or simply reminding them that your company exists, you can reengage.

When you do this, be sure to pay attention to the interaction (or lack thereof). You can even include a button in the email that allows a customer to resubscribe or confirm their subscription. On the other hand, you can make a very obvious unsubscribe button in case they would like to leave the mailing list.

6. Always Make Unsubscribing Easy

Even for those who are active in your audience, you should offer a clear and simple unsubscribing method. They should only have to click a button. At the most, they may have to confirm their email address.

That’s it.

Don’t make them take an exit survey or tell you why they’re leaving. You can certainly offer this, but it should not be a requirement.

That’s only going to make the customer more frustrated. You’ll end up leaving your relationship with them off on a bad note. This almost ensures that they’ll never come back to your company even if they want to in the future.

7. Never Buy Lists

We really, really hope that you aren’t buying subscribers. Not only is it illegal, but it’s also not healthy for your analytics at all. This means that you could be fined for the act while also paying for it in your engagement rates.

So, we highly recommend that you avoid buying subscribers. Even if you only have five people on your mailing list, it’s not worth it.

If you’re struggling with having too little subscribers, try to think of all of your subscribers sitting in a room. Whether it’s one or five or twenty, think about how important that person or those people are.

We understand what it’s like to work from the bottom. It’s hard and even sometimes embarrassing, but we promise that your work will pay off. Just keep at it without trying to cheat your way through.

Email List Maintenance Made Easy

If you implement the seven tips that we’ve shared here, your email list maintenance will be so easy. You’ll find that your analytics are higher and more accurate because you’re taking the time to make sure that you have legitimate subscribers.

However, you may not have the time to go through and verify emails to clean up your list. For those people, we recommend investing in an email validation system. This will help you keep your entire list clean without much effort on your part.