Contact databases and email lists are in a state of constant flux for a variety of reasons: employers and employees change jobs, companies merge or change their names, contacts abandon their old emails.
What’s more, up to one-third of your subscribers will never open your emails, much less click on your call to action – thus wasting time, effort and money. So what’s the point of talking to them?
While there are multiple factors to the success of an email marketing campaign – such as subject lines and high-quality content – none are as impactful as having accurate and up-to-date data in your email list.
That’s why having a strategy to clean and grow your email database will ensure you maximize your campaign impact and drive the highest conversion.
Run a database health checkup
You can generally achieve this by contacting everyone in your database annually to check on their details and confirm their interest in your messages.
These checkups should provide you with vital insights into how your leads interact with your marketing. Manually reviewing your database may be time-consuming, but it will pay for itself in the long run.
Following up on bounce or invalid email addresses also provide a new opportunity to convert a prospect into a customer. See our article on email bounces to learn more.
Scrub inactive email subscribers
Email scrubbing is removing unengaged subscribers from your email list – typically those subscribers who have not opened your email campaign for more than 12+ months.
However before you clean your email list, you can try to re-engage inactive subscribers with a win back email campaign. Since they’re already signed up, a fresh approach could pique their interest and make them love your emails again.
A good starting point is to figure out why they’re inactive. One of the easiest ways to do this is to ask. You can also offer subscribers an additional incentive to connect, like a special offer, discount coupon or lead magnet.
If you don’t have time to re-engage inactive subscribers, it’s important to remove them from your email list so that you can market only to people who want to receive your emails.
When your email list is bloated with unengaged subscribers, it can be hard to tell how your marketing strategy is working. For best results, you should aim to do an email list cleanup at least a couple of times a year.
Even if you have a smaller list that’s truly interested in and acting on your messages, your email marketing statistics will be more accurate. That means you can safely use that data to guide your future marketing efforts.
Invite people to join your email list
Now that your database is clean, you want to focus on continuing to grow your list organically with quality subscribers.
You can leverage a lot of the existing networking and prospecting activities to help build your list by encouraging customers and prospects to subscribe to your campaign.
Here are a couple of strategies you can use to grow your list:
- Use exit pop ups: You can use exit popups like Opt-In Monster on your website to encourage visitors who are about to leave to enter their email address to receive a special offer or exclusive resource. Unlike immediate popups, exit intent popups won’t disrupt visitors as they browse your site, and they can help you capture more email addresses from visitors.
- Add subscribe button or form to your website: You can add a small piece of code to add a button or form to your website so new subscribers are automatically added to your Campaign Monitor lists.
- Add a signup button to your Facebook Page: Add a sign up button on your Facebook Company page.
- Add a link to your employees signature: You can create a signup form page with a unique URL, that you can share online or add to your employees email signature to attract new subscribers.
Contact your Extu representative for assistance in creating and adding subscribe forms.
