Every email marketer should develop proper list management skills. This is fundamental to the success of your email marketing efforts. 

Your email list management systems can make or break the success of your email campaigns.

Without a properly managed email list, you’re bound to lose out on a lot of business opportunities.

A poorly managed list will lead to deliverability issues and spam complaints.

That’s why it’s crucial to learn the basics of email list management.

This will ensure you get the most out of your time, money, and resources.

Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your email list management skills.

In this guide, we’ll take a look at some of the best practices to develop those skills quickly. 

But before that, what are some of the benefits of developing your list management skills?

The Benefits of Having a Well-Managed Email List

An email list is one of the most important pillars in the bridge to online success. 

Having a well-managed email list means:

• More open rates;
• Lower email bounce rate;
• Higher click-through rates;
• Lower unsubscribe rates; and
• More conversions.

It also means better deliverability, low spam complaints, and a better sender reputation. 

But, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

To have a well-managed and responsive email list, you’ll need to be proactive with your database. You’ll need to nurture it and keep it up to date.

If you aren’t careful, your list will end up being a source of frustration and a drain on your resources.

So without further ado, here are our five tips on how to keep your mailing list from being a pain in the neck.

5 Easy Tips to Improve Your Email List Management Skills

We’ve got some good news and some bad news. Let’s start with the bad news first. 

The bad news is that there are quite a few things you’ll need to do on a regular basis to keep your email list nice and clean.

The good news is that there are tools out there that can do it all for you. We are talking about email automation tools. 

Depending on the size of your list, you could opt for the good old manual process, or you could invest in an automated system.  

Once you decide which option is best ensure that you routinely do the following:

• Analyze Your Lists
• Segment Your Lists
• Clean Your Lists
• Create Re-engagement Campaigns
• Make It Easy To Unsubscribe

Analyze Your Lists

You have to analyze your email lists to know how your subscribers are responding to your content. 

These data points are essential to understanding how well you are marketing. On no account can they be ignored. 

Email marketing tools such as Mailvio makes it easy to analyze all this information at a glance. And, most importantly, it gives you a better understanding of our audience. 

In this digital era, it is vital that companies understand their audience. 

Understanding your audience will make it easy for you to “speak their language.” Which will lead to better communication and service on your part.

Segment Your Lists 

There are two main reasons for segmentation: 

To create more personalized messages and to reduce unsubscribe rates.

Personalization is the art of making emails more relevant to the individual recipient.

Segmentation allows you to target specific groups of people within your list. This is sometimes known as targeted email marketing. 

Targeted email marketing improves engagement, clicks, and conversions. 

Targeted emails allow you to write more personalized and relevant emails.  

You can also segment your lists based on:

For example:

Sports brands segment their lists by gender to send appropriate offers to both men and women. 

Segmentation will also allow you to create a more responsive email list. 

Clean Your Lists

List cleaning is one of the most important lists management skills you can develop.

Cleaning your email list is crucial to your success as an email marketer. No matter how they were created, your email lists are likely to have spam traps and invalid email addresses. 

Failure to remove these addresses before sending an email will reflect poorly on your sender reputation.  

Having a clean email list will help you:

The best way to clean your email list is to identify and remove inactive contacts. This is where segmentation can come into play. You can segment your list based on activity and weed out contacts who are inactive. 

You will also need to remove duplicates and spam email adresses from your list.

In doing so, you will minimize the risk of hitting a spam trap, which can have a huge impact on your deliverability rate. 

In addition to removing inactive subscribers, you can use a list-cleaning service. These tools help you clean up your list very fast so you can mail knowing only real people will receive your content. 

Launch Re-engagement Campaign

Before you remove your inactive contacts for good, you should consider sending a re-engagement email campaign as a last-ditch effort to get them back on board.

But before you do that, you need to identify what was it that made them inactive in the first place.

Was it that they find your content – and your emails – boring?

Were they lost in a sea of similar emails?

Were they overwhelmed by too much information?

If you’re able to answer these questions, you can tailor your re-engagement strategy accordingly.

You could also throw in a free offer or discount code in your re-engagement campaign, and see if that can boost their response rate. 

Of course, this is not always possible, and you may just need to accept that those contacts are gone forever. 

Nevertheless, re-engaging inactive contacts could be worth your while so you should definitely give it a try. 

Make It Easy For People To Unsubscribe

You don’t want to make it too difficult for people to unsubscribe from your emails. Otherwise, they’ll mark your emails as spam.

Make it easy to unsubscribe to ensure your list harbors no unhappy customers. 

Your unsubscribe link should be clearly visible and included in every email.

You may also want to offer several unsubscribe options. Sometimes people will only want to opt out of one email list. 

If people can easily unsubscribe they will most likely go for that option. 

Over time this will remove uninterested subscribers from your list. Keep your list healthy. 

Here is an example of a simple yet effective unsubscribe email link:

Conclusion 

Proper list management skills will make all the difference in your business.

This will ensure that you remove spam traps and other types of invalid addresses. Thus keeping your list healthy and boosting your sender reputation. 

Good list hygiene is something that will separate you from the crowd. 

And remember, people should only ever receive relevant content from you. You can achieve this by segmenting your email lists to target specific subscribers. 

And whatever you do, don’t forget to clean your lists.

Are you already cleaning your lists? If so, what list cleaning service do you use? Let us know in the comments below so that others can check it out.