Tools for e-mail list management

E-mail marketing is one of the most known channels when it comes to business promotion. It basically means every commercial message that brand is sending to its consumers. It’s time-saving and cost-effective. You can easily communicate with your audience and inform your customers about current discounts and so on.

Moreover, it gives a lot of personalised possibilities. You can use marketing automation options to send e-mails to particular clients. For example, a system can automatically send a message that reminds a customer about abandoned cart or informs about special offer waiting in your e-store, or your readers can get blog articles from the category they visited before that you’ve recently published.

In your e-mail marketing activities, you have to act strategically. You need to come up with a plan that will help you promote your business. There are many tools that can facilitate visual creation and sending e-mails. Some of them are even free or offer free trials, so they’re worth using.

The other important aspect is the e-mail marketing list. In the following text, you’ll find out more about it, why it matters in your performance and what tools can help you with managing your lists.

The crucial role of e-mail marketing lists.

Adobe’s survey shows that e-mail has an ROI of $40 for every $1 spent. That far more effective than organic search and paid search combined. E-mail marketing lists suppose to be filled with subscribers who are interested in your business or products. It’s essential because you need to have an audience to communicate your message. Even the most beautiful and awesome e-mail won’t cause any good if you don’t have enough subscribers to send it to.

E-mail marketing list needs to include your audience, not random people. It’s worth to keep subscriber lists hygiene because than you can communicate with your potential customers and you don’t waste time and money on sending e-mails to people who don’t care about it at all. Only then your efforts can be resultful. So you need to get as many engaged subscribers as possible to build a strong list, especially for your business. Fortunately, there are a lot of ideas on how to do that, and you’ll find out about them later in this text.

How to build an e-mail marketing list?

It’s not easy to gather the most accurate database of subscribers, but it’s doable. Follow these steps to achieve success in your e-mail marketing efforts:

• Take care of your website. Make sure it’s intuitive, user-friendly. It supposes to be easy to browse so that your visitors can get familiar with your products and services, or be able to find your blog or whatever information they need and also find your opt-in form for subscription. If you don’t have a website, there are several creators that can help you build it quickly and easily (Landingi, WordPress, Wix, HubSpot and so on).
  Identify your audience. Establish who you want to become your subscriber and where you can find them. That will help you reach the most interested people. It’s a great idea to create a marketing persona – kind of your „ideal” customer that will help you realise his needs. It supposes to include information like name, job title, demographics, challenges and goals. One you’ll find people, you can convince them to share their e-mail addresses.
• Set up pop-ups and slide-ins on your website. Don’t be pushy and try to personalise the invitation to subscribe to your newsletter. Add an appealing call to action to increase your chances of getting a new subscriber. There are a lot of the possibilities to catch your audience attention on your website. For example, exit or scroll pop-ups. Therefore you can reach a specific target group like people who browse a certain piece of content for some time or did other particular action on your website. It’s quite precise information for you while creating an e-mail marketing list.
• Use social media. These channels can be very helpful while promoting business in general but also building a list of subscribers. One thing is simple posting about your newsletter to attract your audience to subscribe. Additionally, you can also run some contest and share reward in exchange for content information. On Twitter use relevant hashtags to get to your target group. Moreover, you can run advertisements on social media; Facebook even has a special format for lead generation. Take advantage of those solutions.
• Offer gated content. Prepare something really nice and appealing to your audience. In exchange for it, they’ll share an e-mail address. It can be an e-book, but also other valuable content like webinar or video. Give your customers a preview on what you offer, so they’ll be more eager to share information once they’ll get attracted to your piece of content. Nowadays, consumers look for many information on the Internet because the access is effortless and they don’t like to pay for the content. Instead, they’re willing to give an e-mail address, especially if they’re interested in the field – they’d like to receive valuable newsletter int the future.

Every audience is different so you might need to test all of those options and optimise your efforts. You can test different copy and visuals to find out which ones perform the best for your business when it comes to building an e-mail marketing list.

How to manage e-mail marketing list?

Ok, let’s say you’ve already built your subscribers list. Now, you need to take care of it. It’s not the task that you suppose to do one, but continuously you have to make sure that your subscribers are willing to interact and engage with your brand or products. Only that way your e-mail campaigns can be effective. Here you can find some ideas on how to manage your e-mail marketing list:

• Welcome your subscriber. Thank them for joining your audience – the best is to automate this process so that subscriber can be welcome immediately after signing in for your newsletter. It’s also the time to ask for adding your address to approved senders and to remind about the topic of your newsletter and inform how often you want to send your e-mails. That way if someone signed up by mistake based on this information he can unsubscribe. Therefore you only have on your list people who actually want to get your messages, so your open rate can be higher.
• Manage your e-mail list. By subscription management, subscribers can inform about their newsletter preferences, such as frequency of receiving messages and customising content. Therefore, instead of losing subscriber for good, you can stay in touch with him on terms that are acceptable to him. The thing is that personalisation allows everyone to achieve their goals and create a win-win situation. Most of e-mail marketing tools allow for managing subscription so all you need to do is enable that function so that your audience can benefit from it – as well as you and your company.
• Take care of list hygiene. It seems that building the most prominent possible list is your goal. While in fact what matters is quality of this list. To make sure that you’re communicating with the most accurate people, you need to check regularly if you have a proper database. For example, people from time to time can change e-mail address, as for example they change job position or company they work for. Therefore it’s vital to remove invalid addresses from your list, as well as hard bounces. The less hard bounces your newsletters experience, the more reliable is your sender for e-mail providers. Consequent purging will keep your e-mail marketing list clean and will increase your sender score.
• Look for an engaging audience. Once you gathered a number of e-mail addresses in your base, you can’t assume everyone will be interested in your content forever. The excellent idea is to run re-engaging campaigns to find out who of your subscribers are still active and wants to interact with your brand. It’s essential because unengaged subscribers not only hurt your sender reputation. Before removing inactive subscribers, it’s an excellent idea to sen them e-mails informing about it so they’ll have last chance for staying in your database.

Remember that when it comes to an e-mail marketing list, you should choose quality over quantity. Of course, every marketer would like to have thousands of subscribers, but it won’t cause any good for your company if it also includes people subscribed by mistake or inactive users. To make the most of your e-mail marketing you need to prepare great content and send it to the right audience.

The best tools for e-mail list management.

Here you can find a list of chosen tools that cane very helpful when it comes to managing your e-mail marketing lists:

• OptinMonster
• GetResponse
• MailerLite
• AWeber
• SendinBlue
• Mad Mimi
• ConstantContact
• MailChimp
• Vertical Response
• ManyContacts
• CampaignMonitor
• MailGun
• ActiveCampaign
• iContact
• Emma

Hope that you find this text helpful and you know how to manage your e-mail marketing list. Try a few solutions to find out which works the best for you. In other blog posts on this website you can find out more about e-mail marketing. While it can seem overwhelming, in fact with tutorials and online tools creating and sending e-mails can become a piece of cake. Don’t give up and try to make the best of your business. If you only focus on your customers and their desires in the context of your brand, you’ll get a revenue. Good luck in all of your marketing activities!