7 Best Email List Management Practices for WordPress Users

Email list management is a crucial part of email marketing that consists of activities like managing your database in various segments, analyzing your subscribers’ behaviour & taking all the important actions to keep the list healthy & alive. After all, the money is in the list.

As a WordPress user, it’s important to have a solid email list management strategy in place to effectively communicate with your audience. One of the best practices for email list segmentation is to group your subscribers based on their interests or actions taken on your site. This allows you to send targeted and relevant emails, rather than generic newsletters that may not appeal to everyone on your list.

In this article, you will understand on a deeper level –

• Why should you practice email list management?
• Importance of email list management
• What are the email list management best practices?

So let’s begin.

Why should you practice email list management?

You are designing a marketing strategy and you want to run some discount offers for the people living in California.

Now, the data with you has people from across the US. How would you be able to segregate ONLY California people from the list? Copy-paste from the excel file?

Sounds tedious, right? But you won’t have an option.

This is why you must consider email list management.

When you do it, it saves you time by getting done with such tasks with just a click.
And for your audience, it helps them receive relevant, customized & interesting content from your side.

Win-win for both!

Here’s where you can join the list of our 1,50,000 + clients doing this with the help of our FREE WordPress email marketing plugin.

Importance of email list management

Business owners, marketers, bloggers & influencers who look forward to running successful email marketing campaigns often underestimate the efforts of organizing their email list or cleanup of their email list.

Little do they know, if the list has the potential to give them a high return on investment, they must do it the right way.

Here’s why:

To build long-lasting relationships with your customer

This is possible only when you filter the list and manage it in a way that your subscribers receive the highest quality and relevant content.

To save your own money

There is a certain amount of money that you spend behind your ‘each subscriber’. So to make sure the money spent is worth the ROI, you must alter the list keeping only the interested and valid people.

Better measurement of success

With a healthy and accurate email list, it becomes a cakewalk to analyze which email marketing strategy is working and analyze the metrics like open rates, CTR, unsubscribe rate and others.

Best email list management practices

Now, that you have your ‘WHY’ & clear understanding of email list management, let’s get to the ‘HOW’!

Start with making a positive first impression by a Welcome email

Now, this will be the very first communication between you and your audience after they subscribe to your email list.

It is very important to get this one right to set the tone for further communications.

Here’s how you can do it:

• Make it personalized & call them by their name to establish that friendship.
• Offer some Free content/training or a coupon Code as a welcome gift.
• Give a clear CTA and let them know their next step before ending it.
• Ask them to save your email id to the contact list so that anytime you send them an email, it will be assured to reach them.
• Ask if there’s anything they would want to see in the next email or if they have any feedback so far.
• Close it with a warm welcome once again and thank them for entering your email family.

Consider This… According to Entrepreneur, welcome emails get 320% more revenue than any other kind of email. So, make sure you leverage this opportunity at it’s best.

Keep your email list clean by automatic list cleanup

It’s important to get rid of those subscribers who serve no purpose from time to time.

This is why you should do that:

• To avoid being tagged as a ‘Spam’. The more invalid emails you keep serving, the higher the chances of ending up in the junk folder. Hence, get rid of the inactive & dead subscribers to keep your brand dignity intact.
• To reduce the high bounce rate. There could be two situations: high & soft bounces. High bounces occur when the email id is incorrect or invalid while soft bounces occur due to having too long email or any server issues.
• To keep a healthy delivery rate. A high rate of missed deliveries can negatively affect your email deliverability.
• To reduce cost. Every email that you send out to subscribers incurs a certain cost so make sure to whomsoever you’re sending these emails, are worth the ROI you’re expecting.

Take explicit permission using single opt-in and double opt-in

There are two ways following which your subscribers join your email list:

• By simply entering their email id in the sign-up and next they start receiving emails from you. This is what you call ‘single opt-in’.
• Another way of doing is called ‘double opt-in’. In this, the subscriber enters his/her email in the sign-up and next they are asked to verify the email id by clicking on a link which they receive in their email inbox. This reassures the fact that the person willingly put their details and it wasn’t a mistake.

While single opt-in is a simple way to get it started, double opt-in may cause a little headache to the subscriber. However, double opt-in ensures that explicit permission which single opt-in doesn’t.

Let your audience decide for their email subscription

While looking to run a successful email marketing campaign, sending too many emails to your subscribers can totally put them off and force them to opt-out.

So what’s the optimum sending frequency?
No exact answer but what can work the best here is adopting a trial & error method and getting to know your audience through the same.

Get your inactive subscribers to participate

There will be people who would subscribe to your list only to not open a single email after that. Yes, this can happen and there are ways to somehow get these ‘inactive’ or we may say ‘ignorant’ subscribers to become active before we go to the extremes of cleaning them out of the list.

Here are some:

• To get them to at least open your email, write an appealing and attractive subject line which they can’t resist to go and open.
• One of the mistakes that could be happening on your end is not segmenting the list properly. So do that and then customize your campaigns accordingly.
• Ask them openly about what they want from you.
• Send them some gentle reminders that if they don’t wish to participate further, you would be unsubscribing them from the list. This can get some of them back to life and engage with you.

Email list segmentation

Email list segmentation allows you to divide your email data into multiple segments and small groups to send highly targeted emails as per your marketing strategy.

While your customers are subscribing to your email list, ask them, what do they wish to receive. Discount offers, blogs, new product updates, or all of them?

The open and click rate of such customers will always be on a higher note.

Other than this, you can segregate the list on some parameters such as:

• Geographic
• Demographic
• Psychographic
• Interests
• Purchasing behaviour

and more…

Make it easy to unsubscribe

Why would your audience want to unsubscribe?

• They’re not receiving what they signed up for
• Invaluable, irrelevant content as per interests
• Emails full of click-baits and with spammy vibes
• They’re not interested in the topic anymore
• Reason being anything, if they wish to leave, let them.

Winding-up

A WordPress mailing list plugin can help you easily manage and segment your email list, as well as automate email campaigns and track their performance. With these tools and strategies in place, you’ll be able to effectively manage your email list and improve the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

The best way to go about email list management is to be active yourself with its practices and keep your audience alive with the help of all the tips provided in this article.

And to carry out email marketing success for you, Icegram Express plugin will help you execute all of the above list management practices smoothly.