To help you understand the concept of contact list management, we will guide you through the following topics:
- What is Contact List Management
- What is the Risk of Poor List Management
- The Benefits of Having Only One contact list
- Best Practices for List Management
- Contact us to get help
What is Contact List Management
Email contact list management is the practice of managing your contacts in lists and segments. The goal is to keep your contacts organized based on their engagement and who they are. A clear segmentation strategy can help you achieve this goal.
Proper segmentation is the key to success in list management. The better you segment your contacts based on their behavior and interests, the higher your chance of getting a higher conversion or engagement rate.
What is the Risk of Poor List Management
Poor list management will negatively affect your sender reputation and result in low email deliverability. This happens when you have too many contacts unsubscribing from your list, reporting you as spam, having many contacts who never open your emails, or even having spam traps in your list. In MailExpress, your email reputation health is measured based on the average of your last 7-day’s bounce and complaint rates.
Email providers will automatically mark your emails as spam if you have a poor sender reputation. In the worst scenario, your sending domain or IP may end up on an email blacklist, and all of your emails will be marked as spam and can never reach your recipients’ primary inboxes.
The Benefits of Having Only One Contact List
Although MailExpress allows you to create up to 30 email contact lists per account, there are good reasons why you should avoid using multiple contact lists. Using a single email list and segmenting that list is a better approach most of the time.
- When a recipient unsubscribes, the recipient is unsubscribed at the list level. Therefore, keeping a single list can avoid sending campaigns to unsubscribed users if they belong to multiple lists.
- Having a single list can help you better track your campaigns’ historical data and performances; the data may not be transferable or shareable if you use multiple lists.
- You can only select a single list of recipients each time when creating a campaign email. Keeping contacts in multiple lists means you would need to send multiple campaign emails.
- Segmentation rules are based on every single list, not across lists. Organize your contacts with different custom fields in one list rather than maintain multiple lists in your account.
Best Practices for List Management
Keep in mind that only an engaged list is a good one; if no one opens it, no one reads it.
- What determines a healthy contact list:
- Good deliverability rates
- Good open rates
- Low bounce and complaint rates
- Frequently new subscribers join your list through double opt-in
- What contact is unhealthy and should be cleaned from your list:
- A contact who has hard bounced (MailExpress automatically removes them)
- A contact who rarely or never opens your emails
- Contact with an invalid email address
- Duplicate contacts
- Contacts that did not opt-in
- Suspicious emails (spam traps)
- To win this game, remember to
- Go through the check-list above regularly to keep your list clean
- Have your contacts input their address twice to ensure it’s correct when they sign-up your list
- Understand the source where the email was captured and how it should be handled.
- Segment your list correctly to send personalized content. You want to truly connect with them (such that you can address your subscribers by their names in the email)
- Make new contacts feel welcomed and make a good first impression (you can offer them a welcome gift, a discount coupon, etc.)
- Let subscribers choose the frequency of their subscription
- Understand what explicit permission means. You must obtain the permission of the recipient to send them relevant emails
- Never buy or rent lists; only send emails to opt-in subscribers
- Double opt-in is the longer-term strategy compared to single opt-in (single opt-in doesn’t need any verification, whereas double opt-in asks subscribers to verify their email addresses and confirm that they are joining your contact list)
- Re-engage or eliminate inactive/invalid contacts a few times a year
- Make unsubscribing easy
Contact us to get help
If you need a customized solution for your list management, please feel free to contact our expert; we are here to help you! Contact us by submitting a request:
Subject: List Management
What is this about -> Select "Technical Support"
Issue category -> Select "Lists"
Describe things you need help with.
One of our List Management Experts will contact you and help you with a customized solution.