Don’t let the dry term fool you: at its heart, email list management is all about people. Part craft and part science, it requires a nuanced understanding of people’s wants and needs, which in turn inform how they connect with your content. Making sure your subscribers have the information they need and want builds communities and nurtures relationships.
So it’s no surprise then, that effective list management is crucial for communications teams at organizations like universities and municipalities—where stakeholders’ interests and demographics are extremely diverse. Done right, email list management (which is also known as email subscription management, btw) can boost your open rates, reduce the risk of your emails landing in spam, and drive more engagement. In other words: it can nurture relationships and build communities. Get it wrong though, and you could see your emails ignored, or worse, marked as spam.
In this blog, we’ll take a detailed look email subscription management best practices to keep your email list healthy, and your subscribers happy and engaged with the content that is just right for them. What’s inside:
Comprehensive Email List Management Checklist
- What is Email List Management?
- Building and Managing Your Email List
- Maintaining List Hygiene
- Enhancing Subscriber Engagement
- Safety First! Compliance and Data Protection
- Leveraging Analytics and Reporting
- Benefits of Great List Management
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1. What is Email List Management?
Email list management is also known as email subscription management. It describes the processes and strategy involved in managing your contacts and subscribers. It involves tagging and segmenting your contacts, as well as maintenance to remove duplicate and invalid addresses. Keeping clean, well-tagged, and segmented lists helps you keep contacts engaged because it enables you to send highly relevant content to subscribers who are happy to receive it.
2. Building and Managing Your Email List
Communicators at universities, municipalities, and associations typically send informative and educational emails to invested stakeholders. Engagement metrics are more important than any type of “conversion” because, unlike marketers, their goal is to build communities and nurture relationships, not generate leads or sell products. Communicators also have some specific requirements that marketers do not, including the need to send mandatory emails that stakeholders must receive, regardless of their subscription status. Envoke can help.
Envoke’s Mandatory Messaging: Send Email Even to Unsubscribes
If you have a contractual or regulatory requirement to send email to all subscribers (even those who have opted out of optional messages) choose a purpose-built product like Envoke. Too many communications professionals lose time hacking this process, cobbling together small unsubscribe lists to hand-craft small batches of mandatory emails. Envoke takes the guesswork away, giving you a well-tested tool to send emails from which subscribers cannot opt out. Mandatory Messaging is essential for organizations that can demonstrate a legal or contractual requirement to send mandatory information to their stakeholders.
Email List Management: Segmentation
One-size-fits-all eblasts are a thing of the past. Today, segmentation is key. According to Hubspot, Segmented emails drive 30% more opens and 50% more click-throughs than unsegmented ones.
But subscriber segmentation is often an overlooked tool that can be a true differentiator. In an era of information overload, delivering carefully curated content to custom segments can help your subscribers grow to trust, and even count on receiving your emails. (A communicator’s dream come true!) Envoke’s industry-leading tagging and list segmentation tools give you nuanced control over this process, letting you create unlimited, diverse, and powerful segments.
Evnoke’s segments can accommodate a variety of use cases, here are some examples:
- Exclusion lists: Exclude contacts that match certain criteria. For example, you want to send an email to contacts who are on list A but not on list B.
- Combining multiple lists: Combine multiple subscriptions or tags in order to send a single email to contacts across multiple lists. This helps to reduce the number of emails sent to contacts. Contacts are de-duped so they only receive the email once.
- Identify (dis)engaged contacts: Find contacts who opened, clicked, or received (or didn’t open, click, or receive) emails from you in the past X days, in order to send a re-engagement email.
- Custom segment: Identify contacts based on custom criteria such as the date they were added, custom fields, region, etc.
Every Envoke Billing Plan Includes:
- Unlimited subscription lists
- Unlimited internal tagging options
- Unlimited custom fields to handle data specific to your organization
Data Collection Best Practices
When it comes to collecting subscriber data, safety is key and less is often more. Ask for only the information you need to personalize the experience without overwhelming your subscribers. A simple sign-up form asking for a name and email address might be sufficient. You can always gather more data later through surveys or preference centers. Envoke offers unlimited custom forms to gather the information you need.
3. Maintaining List Hygiene
Left to themselves, email lists can degrade over time due to unsubscribes, bounces, human error, and other factors. Regularly maintaining your list helps you remove inactive subscribers, which can improve your open and click-through rates and is an email list management best practice. It’s easy with Envoke, where many clients use our universal integration process that syncs with any database and updates your email subscription list nightly. This automated export both updates your list and removes inactive emails, saving time and keeping your list free from inactive emails. We can also build a custom integration with our powerful API, or accommodate any other integrations your system requires.
Handling Bounces and Unsubscribes
A “bounce” happens when your email marketing platform tries to send an email and it fails to go through due to an issue such as an incorrect email address, a network error, a full mailbox, or the message being blocked by the recipient. High bounce rates matter because they can create deliverability issues. Too many bounces are an indication of poor list quality or sending unsolicited emails.
There are two types of bounces:
- A hard bounce indicates a serious issue that is unlikely to be resolved, for example, an invalid email.
- A soft bounce is less serious and often temporary. Examples of soft bounces are when the mailbox is full or the server is down.
It’s not unusual for addresses that previously worked to become invalid. This can happen when, for example, an employee’s mailbox is disabled after they leave a company. Sometimes the issue is temporary and your provider will try to send the email again.
Tracking bounces
High bounce rates can create deliverability issues as too many bounces are an indication of poor list quality or sending unsolicited emails. At Envoke, bounces are tracked for each contact record for the email campaign you send. A fail score is maintained for each contact record in your account, starting at zero for each new contact, and increasing over time when bounces occur. When a contact’s fail score reaches a threshold it will automatically be marked as an invalid email.
Managing Complaints and Spam Reports
Making it easy not just to unsubscribe from optional content, but to understand and manage optional subscriptions is key to good communication and reducing complaints and spam reports. Communicators know that offering a simple unsubscribe process is essential.
FACT: More than a simple unsubscribe page, Envoke offers a fully customizable Email Preferences page where you can communicate to your contacts what type of messages they can expect to receive, show them other available content, and clearly identify mandatory content from which they cannot unsubscribe.
If you have contacts who need to receive essential emails, regardless of subscription status, talk to Envoke about our Mandatory Messaging feature. This page explains why subscribers are receiving mandatory messages, and links to a page where they can request to be removed if they have a valid reason.
4. Enhancing Subscriber Engagement
Personalization and Email List Management
Personalization goes beyond just using a subscriber’s first name in the email. It involves delivering relevant, personalized content that will delight your contacts. According to Experian, personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates, but 70% of brands fail to use them properly. Use Envoke’s dynamic content blocks to show, or hide, entire blocks of content in emails depending on recipients’ interests. For example, you can send a general staff newsletter but include a block with event invitations, to be shown only to contacts who are interested in events.
Optimizing Send Frequency and Timing
Finding the sweet spot for how often to send emails is tricky. Too many, and you risk annoying your subscribers; too few, and they might forget about you. Surveys can help and subscription management pages can, too – if you provide the option for contacts to choose how often they want to hear from you.
Testing different send times can also have a big impact. Between 10 am and 1 pm is considered best practice, but the best time to send can vary based on your audience, so it’s important to test and optimize.
Re-Engagement Campaigns
It’s normal for some subscribers to become inactive over time. Re-engagement campaigns are a great way to win them back. According to HubSpot, re-engagement emails have an average open rate of 12%, which might not sound high, but it’s better than having those subscribers sitting dormant on your list. Offer something of value—like an invitation or exclusive content—to entice them to start engaging again.
5. Safety First: Compliance and Data Protection
Compliance, security and privacy are three key areas Envoke’s clients deeply care about. So do we. You can put CASL compliance on auto-pilot with Envoke’s comprehensive CASL compliance tools which automatically collect, update, and track consent changes to keep you compliant by default.
- Express consent and unsubscribes are tracked.
- Various types of implied consent are tracked, including the management of rolling expiry dates, so you don’t have to keep track of this manually.
- Mitigate loss of contacts due to expiry of consent by sending automated expiry reminders and consent request emails.
- All consent changes for every contact are logged for a complete audit trail.
Edge cases are no problem. Envoke handles special cases and exceptions and you can override default behaviour as needed. Make sure you’re familiar with the regulations that apply to your audience and always get explicit consent before adding someone to your email list. Envoke can help.
Managing Subscriber Data Securely
With data breaches on the rise, protecting your subscribers’ data is more important than ever. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, data breaches increased by 68% in 2021. Protect your subscribers with secure data, and compliant data storage, and have clear policies in place communicating how data is used and protected. Transparency is key—let your subscribers know what data you’re collecting and how you’ll use it.
TIP: Need Data in Canada? Envoke stores all data in Canada at Canadian data centres in compliance with common Canadian data security and privacy guidelines.
6. Leveraging Analytics and Reporting
Tracking Key Metrics
Monitoring key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates is essential to understanding how well your emails are performing. The open rate across industries averages out to 21.33%, with a click-through rate of 2.62%. If your rates are significantly lower, it might be time to reassess your strategy.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is one of the best ways to optimize your email campaigns. By testing different subject lines, content, and designs, you can see what resonates most with your audience. According to Litmus, A/B testing can increase your email conversion rates by a whopping 49%.
Iterate and Improve: Always
Email marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. Regularly analyze your campaign performance and use the insights to make data-driven adjustments. Over time, these small tweaks can lead to significant improvements in your overall results.
7. Benefits of Great Email List Management
Managing your email list isn’t just a good habit—it’s a game-changing strategy that can set you apart from the competition and take your email marketing to the next level, boosting your ROI. Here’s why taking care of your email contacts can make a big difference:
- You’ll get to know your audience better, especially the segments that bring the most value to your business.
- Your data will be more accurate, allowing you to send personalized emails that increase revenue from your campaigns.
- Your emails are more likely to land in inboxes rather than spam folders, as engagement plays a big role in how spam filters work.
- You’ll keep your list healthy by removing inactive contacts, fake addresses, and spam traps.
- You’ll also save money since most email marketing platforms charge based on the number of contacts or emails sent.
Email list management is both an art and a science. By following these best practices—building a permission-based list, keeping it clean, engaging your subscribers, staying compliant with regulations, and continuously optimizing—a well-managed email list doesn’t just deliver better results; it creates a more engaged and loyal audience.
