Why it is important to create healthy email lists for email marketing and the way to do it

* Partner Post

Apparently, E-mail marketing appears quite easy. You do not have to do anything except writing some good emails and shooting it out to a list of prospective customers to see how customers keep rolling in. However, when you scratch the surface and look under it, you will discover that it is a tough task to ensure that emails reach the recipients' inboxes. Deliverability is one of the most critical factors that determine the success of email marketing. Although it might appear to be very simple, there is several moving part in the process, which mainly includes the reputation of the sender. The reputation of an email sender depends on the success achieved in delivering emails to the inboxes of the target recipients.

To measure the reputation of an email sender, you have to rely on a free service known as Return Path that uses some algorithm to determine the success rate of delivering emails. They use a metric named sender score that reflects the reputation of senders in delivering emails to inboxes. The process comprises of rating all emails sent out from an outgoing mail server and measuring it against a scale 0 to 100, based on deliverability. The sender score is important because the server would consider it for deciding what it should do with your emails. The sender score depends on how the recipients respond to emails and your email sending habits. Your email sending habit is important because you must take the responsibility of ensuring that emails reach the recipients without any misses.

The healthy email list is a must

According to any Chicago SEO expert for ensuring proper delivery of emails into the recipients' inboxes, you have to create a healthy mailing list. Remember that every time an email fails to reach the recipient, it weighs down on your reputation as a sender and affects the sender score. A healthy email list comprises of addresses of recipients who are expecting your emails as you must have some prior business relationship with them. Therefore, to protect your reputation as a sender, you have to scrutinize your email list to ensure that it includes the addresses of consenting recipients only. In this article, we will discuss how you could identify the consenting addressees in your email list. Ask some questions to yourself that reveal whether or not your email list contains addresses that are willing to accept emails from you.

Consider the business relationship you have with the recipients

The most important consideration for including an address in your email list is that you should have some business relationship with the prospective recipient. Only when there is some relationship with the recipients, they would not feel bad about receiving emails from you. They would know that you are likely to stay in touch with them for your business needs. If you send emails to people not known to you in any way, they would simply treat your email as an unsolicited communication and mark it as spam as they might not be interested in it. Once your emails receive the tag as spam, it will negatively affect the sender score, and the mail servers would receive a negative signal that subsequently affects the delivery of other emails. In email marketing, sending unsolicited emails is taboo and that you must have a list of interested mail recipients only.

Respect the unsubscribe list

For creating a healthy email list, you must ensure that you pay due respect to recipients who may have unsubscribed from your list earlier. It would ensure that the email list you have created includes addresses of interested recipients only. Therefore, maintaining a list of unsubscribed addresses is equally important because without it you would never know who the ones are interested in receiving your emails. The ideal way is to load the master list along with the unsubscribed list into the system. Not adhering to this method would mean that you would still send emails to those who have unsubscribed already and they would not hesitate to mark your emails as spam. Not only sending spam emails affect the sender score, but it also goes against the law.

Create your email list

Ever since email marketing became popular, readymade email lists from third parties also made its way to marketers. Unfortunately, these lists have little or no relevance to your targeted customer base and are of no use. Since the addresses in the list are all new and unknown to you and do not have any prior business relationship with you, it goes against the basic tenets of sending emails for marketing. The addresses in the list do not have any expectation of receiving any emails from you because they have no connection to you in any way. These readymade lists usually harvest addresses from some directories and are strangers to you who would not mind treating your emails as spam and damage your prospects as a sender that can harm your email marketing campaign. Create your list to ensure that it mostly includes recipients related to you in some way.

The frequency of sending emails

Having a healthy email list is not enough because you have to ensure that you send emails to the addresses at some reasonable interval of time. If you have not contacted some addresses for almost a year, is all probability they must have forgotten you and would not be expecting emails from you. The relationship that you enjoyed with the recipients thus might end. To avoid the embarrassment of recipients whom you once knew now becoming strangers, send out emails to all recipients periodically so that you stay in touch with them. It would prevent the possibilities of your emails turning into spams and affecting your reputation as a sender.

To create a healthy email list, you have to create your list and compose compelling emails that drive traffic to your website. Entice customers with attractive offers that keep them hooked to your emails and open the gateways for earning revenue.