Once you begin building your mailing list, it’s important to keep it vibrant and healthy with an organized maintenance routine. It’s not enough to simply cultivate subscribers - you also need to pay attention to their behavior. Your goal as an email marketer is to send engaging and relevant emails - and that means consistently checking in on your audience’s interest levels and keeping your list up-to-date.

Take a look at these 2 easy best practices to help you get started.

Give your list a regular ol’ scrubover every 6 months. This is a crucial step because it helps you hone in on unengaged subscribers and remove them. And that’s important because the way they interact (or rather, don’t) with your emails tells their email service providers that your messages should be rejected - not a good thing! In a nutshell, the more your emails are deleted, not opened or marked as spam, the lower your deliverability rates will go. 

 

How should you tackle this? First, remove inactive subscribers and email addresses that hard bounce and consistently soft bounce (we’ll help you with this). This may thin out your list, but think about the long-term - percentage-wise, and how your emails will get more overall traction.

Next, make sure that each subscriber did indeed opt-in to your list and give you permission to send them marketing emails. You want your readers feeling happy and respected, not confused and spammed. Similarly, never re-add unsubscribers. 

Behind your subscribers’ email addresses lie real people - people with various interests, dislikes and demographics. As an email marketer, your job is to create a connection with them. This can sometimes be challenging, given their different preferences. Enter the power of segmentation. By splitting your entire audience into groups, you can create mini-lists and get more personal with your emails.

Let’s take a look at online store owner Jane’s experiences to see how this works:

By tailoring your emails to suit the unique needs of each subscriber, you can get more creative with your content. Instead of generic sales announcements, event invites or newsletter updates, you can focus your messaging and build real relationships with your subscribers.

Managing your mailing list is a continuous balancing act of keeping a close eye on your subscribers’ activities and knowing when to take action. By regularly tracking your audience’s interactions, you’ll gain deeper insights into their engagement patterns and be able to better organize your list. 

Obviously you want to get the word out to as many readers as possible, but remember that your ultimate goal is for your emails to be opened and your links to be clicked. And that means talking to people who really want to be part of the conversation with on-point, relevant info.