Email Marketing Newsletters: Your List Management Checklist

Annaliese Henwood

So, you want to send out a marketing email newsletter, right?

You think you have it all ready to go, but do you really?

This essential email marketing checklist (a 5-part series) goes over each element you must follow to get the most out of your hard work.

These are the elements I discuss in this series, all of which are of considerable importance:

• Email Marketing Newsletters: Your List Management Checklist (this post)
  
• Email Marketing Newsletters: Your Design Checklist
  
• Email Marketing Newsletters: Your Timing Checklist
  
• Email Marketing Newsletters: Your Testing Checklist
  
• Email Marketing Newsletters: Your Follow-Up Checklist

Let’s start with your email marketing list management…

Clean up your email list of all bounces, unsubscribers and inactives.

• If you keep sending emails to accounts that bounce, it affects your deliverability rate.
  
• If people have chosen to unsubscribe, obey that request.
  
• If account holders are not acting on your emails (open rate, click-through rate, etc.), send them a customized email to get them to respond.

Real-Life Scenario:

I subscribe to 15+ blogs. It’s a lot, I know, and I have a tough time keeping up with it all. With so many emails coming in each day, I don’t always get to each and every one.

One day, Kim Garst sent me an email asking about whether I’m still interested in hearing from her. Granted, it wasn’t Kim herself sending me this email, but it still made me feel far more interested in her emails than if I hadn’t received anything.

Kim Garst is the only one who has contacted me like that, and it makes her blog stand out to me far more than the others who don’t interact at all.

Resources:

I’m going to cite Vertical Response several times in this series. They have a fantastic blog filled with incredibly informative articles on email marketing. I can almost guarantee you can find everything you need to know about email marketing on their blog site.

The first VR article I include here is titled: 15 Hygiene Tips to Keep Your Email List Clean as a Whistle. In it, you’ll learn how to clean, maintain and grow your email list to ensure its health and success.

The second VR article here is titled: 8 Ways to Wake up Non-Responders. The success of your email list depends on whether your subscribers are actively responding or not. When you have inactive subscribers, you’re missing out on many great opportunities to build relationships with them. This article gives you 8 steps to take to reconnect with these subscribers.

Segment your list by whatever means makes sense for your needs.

There’s all sorts of advice out there for how to segment your lists, but ultimately, it should be you that determines how in the end. Does it make sense to divide by demographic or by their opt-in info? Find out what method(s) will help you most, and go by that.

Real-Life Scenario:

I used to work for a local nonprofit, and I was in charge of their email marketing. When I first started, we didn’t segment at all. We sent one email to our entire list regardless of whether it was relevant to them or not. We quickly learned our lesson, and from then on, we customized our lists by type of nonprofit. We then sent different emails relating to the different nonprofit types, and our open rates and click-through rates did improve.

Resources:

Vertical Response has an article (6 Ways to Segment Your Email List to Improve Your Success) that explains what you can do to overcome “bulk email disease” and get the most out of your email lists.

Thoughts? Questions?

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