Often times you’ll hear people suggesting to purchase an email list from a 3rd part in order to start you out, trust that this is a horrendous idea leaving you only with low engagement, higher vulnerability to spam filters, and an audience which though seemingly close from first impression, is in fact far from being your target.
In order to collect email subscribers, we’ll collaborate with our content, social media marketing and product teams as to create points of contact in which our target audience might actually be willing to subscribe to our emails, as well as using our own resources to create those points of contact.
A few examples might include:
All of these different points of contact have a common denominator- In each one, you’ll need to firmly establish the value your subscribers will receive as part of their subscription and in exchange for their registration, both ‘right now’ as well as throughout the email campaign, delivering value each time anew, as best you can. Do advise with your content, SMM and product lead for opportunities to join subscribers to your email list.
Maintaining our list involves removing recipients with whom we encounter a hard bounce, or that consistently don’t receive our emails due to soft bounces, and that consistently don’t engage with our emails despite receiving them.
The health of our list will establish our long-term positions with different email servers and their spam-filters. Failing to maintain that health so may result in losing a greater audience than just a single recipient.
While hard bounces are a trivial matter of removing as soon as possible, different email marketing platforms have different ways of dealing with soft bounces, do check the documentation of your email platform in order to see how soft bounces will be handled, as well as check the code numbers for each specific type of soft bounce.
There’s no doubt that you should try again with soft bounces, diminishing message size and sending at different times. Though when you have established consistency of soft bounces with the recipient you should remove them from your list.
While it may seem intuitive that we should target and deliver to any valid email address in our possession, there are two things to keep in mind,
one is avoiding spam filters- when you consistently engage with recipients who have put you in their spam-box, your email address will be inductively spam-filter on the server, in severe cases your email marketing platform may even suspend your account. This, of course, won’t be a matter of a single recipient, but a trend in your general email activity.
Thus it is highly advised to remove recipients who have consistently been disengaged with your messages both in open-rate and CTR.
The other is correlating email engagement to user activity on our website which could point to a failure in message personalization, in contrast, to complete recipient disengagement from the brand.