Marketing Lists

Marketing lists are one of the most valuable assets your company has, and keeping them in top shape is critical to your business and the success of your marketing efforts.

Good marketing lists deliver: • Happy recipients • An engaged community of prospects and customers • Higher conversion rates

Bad marketing lists result in: • Lower conversion ratios • High bounce rate • Higher costs

Ugly marketing lists cause: • A high incidence of spam complaints and unsubscribes • The risk of getting on the wrong side of an ISP, i.e. a blacklist

Getting (and Keeping!) Subscribers

There are many strategies for acquiring subscribers; most involve offering something of value to the individual in exchange for their contact information. For example, offering an eBook in return for completing a form, conducting a contest or giveaway based on an entry form, or hosting a webinar or event that requires registration. At ClickDimensions, we get a lot of mileage from content marketing via eBooks and webinars. To see how we do it, read our eBook, Hooked on Content. No matter how you entice individuals to provide you with their email address, the key is to ensure that your lists are permission-based.

Learn more about how ClickDimensions’ subscription management features work with your CRM marketing lists. Permission-based marketing means that your prospects, leads, and customers have directly granted your organization permission to market to them. In email marketing, this means that they have “opted in” to be on your list. This opt-in can be in the form of a subscription sign-up form on your website, a paper form at your place of business, or even a conversation you have in person or on the telephone with someone. There are many ways to get someone’s permission, but it should be clear if you have not received it. Giving a recipient an opportunity to unsubscribe or “optout” is good practice, but it is not permission-based if you didn’t first get their permission to send email to them in the first place.

Should I purchase marketing lists?

It may be tempting to purchase a list of email addresses from a third-party; however, most of these lists are not reliable, and the recipients on the list have not opted-in to receiving your emails. Third-party lists are often purposely seeded by ISPs with fake email addresses whose only purpose is to catch spammers. Third-party lists also frequently contain out-of-date email addresses that will cause your bounce rate to go up. In fact, ClickDimensions does not permit the use of third-party lists at all, whether purchased, rented, or borrowed.

Subscription Management

As a best practice (and often required by law), provide a method for your recipients to opt-out of your marketing list. An “unsubscribe” link or other instructions for removing an email address from your list should be included in the footer of your bulk emails. Email marketing solutions like ClickDimensions provide functionality to make this opt-in/opt-out process easy to implement.

When you maintain multiple marketing lists – for example, a newsletter mailing list, an event announcement list, and a list for your loyalty club members – an individual may wish to receive emails from one list, but not another. Subscription management is a way to allow customers to choose which emails they would like to receive by giving them the ability to opt-in to some lists and opt

In ClickDimensions, invalid recipient and bounce type email events will contain a specific bounce code in the record’s Message field. This bounce code provides additional information on the exact cause of the bounce that will be useful in deciding between removal and remediation. out of others. Instead of a single “unsubscribe” link, the person is directed to a web page where they can select which lists they wish to receive.

Maintaining Good Marketing Lists

For an email marketer, few things are as frustrating as when a carefully designed email returns a high number of bounces and spam complaints. One of the most important steps you can take toward achieving and maintaining low bounce and spam rates is to keep clean marketing lists. Here are some tips and suggestions for growing and keeping your marketing lists clean:

Build your list up from scratch

As described earlier, include only email addresses that have been freely given for the purpose of receiving marketing communications. If someone has taken the initiative to give you an email address because they are interested in what your business has to offer, it is unlikely that they will provide an invalid address or view your messages as spam. However, if you use an email list that was purchased or compiled for another purpose, it is likely that a significant portion of the members of that list will have no interest in your messages, resulting in higher numbers of spam complaints and bounces.

Monitor your excluded emails and email events

Every time you send a bulk email, be sure to take a look at the excluded emails and email events, particularly the bounce events. Excluded emails are email addresses that were not sent to due to excessive past bounces. You should seriously consider removing these email addresses from your marketing list. If the email address has been excluded, the recipient did not get the email. It is good to periodically remove these people from your marketing list so that the number of people you think will receive the email will be much closer to the number of people that actually receive the email.

Periodically, ask your recipients to update you if their information changes. Using the ClickDimensions’ Profile Management feature, include a link to the profile management form in your monthly newsletter. It’s a great way to let people keep their data clean for you!

Remove fake, invalid, and “spam trap” email addresses

Keeping up with the excluded emails and email events is a good way to catch fake or misspelled email addresses. “Spam trap” email addresses are valid email addresses that are created for the sole purpose of luring spam. While most often hidden from view so as to only wind up on marketing lists compiled with an automated e-mail address harvester (thus ensuring that all of the emails received are unsolicited), it is not unheard of for someone to submit a spam trap email address maliciously. Some examples of spam trap addresses include nospam@somewhere.com, abuse@antispam. net, postmaster@somedomain.com, etc. While there is no catchall for identifying these kinds of addresses, it is always good to keep an eye out any time you look through your marketing lists.

Remove role accounts

While it may not seem like it, role accounts such as sales@ somecompany.com often have a negative impact on email campaigns. These email addresses are often checked by multiple people and may change hands frequently. Even if it was collected legitimately, it is likely that this email address will become a source of spam complaints.

Prompt customers to update information and give subscription options

It is a good idea to prompt your customers to update their personal information and subscription preferences as often as possible. If customers are aware that they have the option to stop receiving your messages and are consistently presented with the opportunity to provide a new email address, it is likely that each person on your marketing list has given you a current email address and is on that list because they have chosen to be. This can be as simple as including a link to a form or subscription management page in your marketing emails and receipts.

Maintaining a clean marketing list is an ongoing process, but with the above steps you should be able to increase your delivery rate by weeding out harmful and unnecessary list members.

Beyond keeping the list “clean” from a data point of view, it is also a good idea to periodically evaluate the quality of your list from a sales and marketing perspective. While reviewing your marketing list(s), ask these questions:

When was the lead created?

If the “created on” date is more than one year ago, and the lead hasn’t been converted, perhaps they should be disqualified. There’s also a good chance that the contact info for that person is out of date.

What was the lead source?

Evaluate your lead sources continually so you know what drives the best conversions. Dig into your CRM data, especially opportunities, and find out where your best leads are coming from. You might find that your best leads come through referrals, and your worst come through trade shows.

How complete is your data?

This one is harder to analyze, but it can give you some good insight. If you’ve got old, cold leads that have only ever given you an email address, chances are they’re not as qualified as leads where you have a phone number and a company name.

After you’ve scrubbed your list, you may decide that some leads or contacts deserve one last chance. Here are a few ideas for reengaging cold leads:

Phone call campaign

There’s nothing more effective than personal communication, so if you don’t have a large number of leads it might make sense to have the sales team participate in a calling campaign to re-engage, reintroduce and re-qualify.

Personal email from the salesperson that owns the lead

If you have a large list of old cold leads, even after evaluating them against other relevant criteria, it might be worthwhile to have the sales team spend a few minutes each day to send personal emails over a period of a few days or weeks, to see if the lead is still there and still interested in receiving your marketing messages.

Sharpen your messaging

Lastly, if you’ve got good quality leads that have opted into your mailings in the past but have just gone cold, consider a reengagement campaign. These are most effective when you use a little trial and error to refine your messaging. Try sending an email with a subject line like, “We haven’t heard from you in a while” or “We’d like to re-connect.” Or try to regenerate interest through a promotion or discount.