Posts Tagged ‘Email List Management’
Posted by Nic Winters on August 27th, 2010
One advantage of email marketing over many other forms of marketing has always been the ability to track activity and clearly see the actual results related to your messaging. However, this leads to large amounts of information and marketers often get lost in the mountains of data. When taking on this ever-growing mass of information, it is important to identify trends and often your best bet is to look into summary-type reports that allow you to view how results have played out over time.
From time to time we find that three reports within the SubscriberMail interface that clients occasionally tend to underutilize are Subscriber Summary, Subscriber Details, and Subscriber Timeline. These reports provide a wealth of information related to the growth of your subscriber list over time.
Subscriber Summary: shows how many people have been added to your account via opt-in code on your website(s) along with the unsubscribes, bounces, and double opt-ins (if applicable) for a given date range broken out month-by-month
Subscriber Details: shows the details related to each individual that has been added to your account via opt-in code on your website(s) – including the list name they were added to and the webpage on which the opt-in form is located
Subscriber Timeline: allows clients to view day-by-day or month-by-month charts of the gain and loss of subscribers from their lists
Utilizing these reports can provide clients with information related to their opt-in lists and effectively evaluate their efforts to drive list growth.
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can utilize the full SubscriberMail reporting suite.
Posted by Nic Winters on July 6th, 2010
Occasionally, clients will contact us wanting to know how they can determine the number of email addresses within their list that are Yahoo addresses, Gmail addresses, AOL addresses, etc. This information can be valuable when evaluating email design (perhaps as a result of a SubscriberMail Email COMPASS analysis) and determining how large percentages of your subscribers are viewing your emails (as different email clients display HTML differently).
Within the SubscriberMail email platform, clients can access this information via the List Summary function within the List Manager tab. This feature gives insight related to the size of each list within your SubscriberMail account, but also allows you to select to display the breakdown of your subscribers by domain. This report can greatly reduce the time you may have spent exporting a list and attempting to sort by domain, etc.
Posted by Matt Rotroff on April 23rd, 2010
No matter how deep we end up diving into the technical facets of email delivery, it’s important we don’t forget the simple rules we started with. One of the most important of those rules is keeping your email list clean. Keeping a clean email list increases your email delivery rate and inbox placement more than you may think.
Staying current - Keep track of when you attain email opt-ins and how active those opt-ins are. Having an email address or group of addresses that are out-dated can have you unknowingly sending to old addresses that have been converted to spam traps. If you don’t remember how long ago nighthawk@flash.net signed up to receive email, he probably won’t remember either, which leads to a greater likelihood that it will become a spam complaint. Spam complaints and spam traps are two major email marketing issues that can be partially avoided by making sure your email lists are current and contain only active email subscribers.
Unknown users – Another reason to continually scrub your email list, especially of hard bounces, is to clear out any unknown users (bad addresses). If there are too many invalid email addresses in a single mailing, there is a risk of getting temporarily blocked at a recipient’s email server. That means a good amount of the valid email addresses may not be getting your message because of a few too many bad apples.
With the right tools and a little bit of persistence, keeping your email lists well groomed can become an easy and rewarding task. Although there are areas like authentication and filtering that are more complex, the basic building block of list hygiene is the foundation of strong email delivery.
Posted by Nic Winters on April 15th, 2010
As there has been considerable buzz recently throughout the email marketing industry about removing or reengaging inactive email subscribers, many of our clients have contacted us asking how they can identify individuals that fit this description.
First of all, on the strategy side, be sure that you are making an accurate determination regarding what amount of inactivity should qualify an email subscriber to be classified as inactive within your list. This should greatly depend on your mailing frequency and the content of your email campaigns. If you are only sending emails to your list once per month – no clicks or opens over a 3 month period likely shouldn’t qualify an individual to be considered inactive just yet… but if you are mailing weekly, that is likely a different story. As for content, if your emails do not regularly contain compelling call-to-action items that entice your subscribers to click on your links, perhaps clicks should not be expected over too short of a timeframe.
When you have determined the definition of inactivity that is proper for your email marketing strategy, within the SubscriberMail email marketing platform you can access a “Recipient Activity Report”. This report enables you to pull the number of messages sent, opens, and clicks for each email address in your list for a set timeframe. You can then sort this data by opens and clicks, allowing you to identify those who have not opened or clicked for that timeframe.
Once you have identified your inactive email addresses you can develop a strategy for a reengagement campaign to entice these individuals to become active email responders once again. A campaign such as this is the perfect time to contact The Strategic Services team here at SubscriberMail – we would love to hear from you regarding your questions and ideas!
Posted by Nic Winters on April 5th, 2010
In my most recent blog post I passed along some information related to splitting lists, a function usually performed in preparation for testing within your email marketing plan.
If the test you are hoping to perform is related to differences in subject lines, I would like to pass along a time saving tip. After creating your draft email message and saving it in your SubscriberMail account you then have the ability to quickly create and send the additional version of the message. Within the Message tab simply check off the box next to the draft message and hit the Copy button.
This will open a new page that allows you to specify your list selection and insert your updated subject line. This message can even be scheduled from that same screen (instead of walking through the step-by-step creation of another version of your original email).
And while you are thinking about subject lines – be sure to check out our white paper on words you shouldn’t include.
