Knowing how to manage your data and segment your email lists for Email Marketing purposes is essential for maximizing your ROI. Below are some simple best practices for list management and data hygiene.

List Management and Hygiene Best Practices

• Keep a clean list. As you email, have feedback loops set up with every ISP that offers the services and process/remove all hard bounces and users who request to unsubscribe immediately.
  • Consider also tracking soft bounces and treating them as a hard bounce if they bounce more than 3-5 times in consecutive mailings.
• Have a plan for each marketing campaign and segment your data to achieve your goals. You can segment in a number of ways, from gender to geo, down to known openers and clickers. The more you can segment, the better your results will be. Segmenting your data also allows you to control how frequently you mail to different segmented groups.
• Regularly update your data. List attrition in email data can have a huge impact on the overall performance of your data over time. Data that becomes stale with no new data insertions will quickly devalue, so it is a good idea to use data that will have fresh insertions at regular intervals.
• Consider allowing users to confirm their opt-in status on data you have not used in awhile.Sending out an email to an older email list to have them opt-in again to receive your offers may decrease the size of your list, but it will increase awareness of who you are so they know they will hear from you again in the future. This makes the value of the smaller list much more significant without the threat of high complaint rates.
• Regularly run your data through email verification and cleansing processes. There are many 3rd party data cleansing and verification services you can use that have a large database of known bounces, spam traps, honey pots, etc. Or if you have a large database of your own with that information, make sure you remove all bad email addresses from your database before you mail on it.
• Stay relevant to the users in your email database. Don’t mail too often or too little to a list. Too often and you wear out your welcome. Too little and they forget who you are. Know your data and plan your marketing efforts based on this knowledge with a plan to engage them in a way that will get the highest ROI.
• Diversify your offerings. Consider mailing offers mixed with transactional email, auto responders, etc. to develop a positive domain and IP reputation.