By Liviu Tanase
Email marketing can be a game-changer for your business. With a solid plan and a healthy email list, you can skyrocket your sales. Below, find out what are some of the easiest ways to improve your email list and increase your email marketing ROI.
How the quality of your email list can boost your email marketing ROI
More and more businesses rely on email marketing because of its effectiveness and high ROI capabilities. People check their emails frequently. It’s become the way we communicate, and good communication with customers is likely to lead to more sales.
Not all businesses succeed at email, though. Lack of knowledge and focus causes many marketers to fail at generating revenue through email. With your email list being the foundation of your email marketing, it pays to give it the attention it deserves. Ensuring your list is valid, healthy and vibrant is a cornerstone of engagement.
So, here are some great ways to improve your email list and get a better email marketing ROI while you’re at it.
Remove invalid emails
It can be tempting to think that more is better when it comes to your email list. However, you only want valid contacts on your list and email addresses can become obsolete from one day to another.
People stop using their email addresses for a variety of reasons. They may change jobs or schools or perhaps want to lose the old Yahoo email they’ve had forever.
Continuing to send emails to an abandoned email address is not only a waste of resources, it can derail all of your email marketing plans. Why? Because spammers notoriously email indiscriminately without regard for proper protocols. By behaving like a spammer, you’ll cause Internet service providers (ISPs) to start classifying your emails as spam.
Keeping bad contacts on your list has lots of negatives and no upside. It will put your email marketing in peril, so don’t feel bad about your list getting smaller. Your costs are tied to the size of your list, so it doesn’t make sense to continue to send emails that will only bounce. Being perceived as a legitimate sender is the lion’s share of landing in your customers’ inboxes, which is the only place to be. Improving your email marketing ROI can be achieved by using a reliable and ethical tool to scrape emails online, allowing you to expand your contact list efficiently and effectively.
The best way to identify invalid email addresses is to find a good email validation service. Periodically upload your list to the site platform and it will locate any invalid emails. Remove them without delay because they have no value.
Avoid sending emails to known complainers
Another way to have a more successful email list and increase ROI is to avoid sending emails to abuse emails. Abuse emails belong to known complainers – people who often mark messages as spam.
It can be puzzling to understand why, but some people will sign up for a list and then mark it as spam. Maliciousness, carelessness and lack of common sense are some of the reasons why. A good email verifier will be able to root these problematic addresses so you can take them off.
Apart from that, have an unsubscribe button at the top of every email to allow uninterested people a way to get off your list easily. You don’t want uninterested subscribers or any habitual complainers. When people mark you as spam, it sends a message that you aren’t a legitimate email newsletter, but rather you’re a spammer.
Half-hearted or downright hostile people won’t contribute to your email list being a success. Again, don’t worry about the number of subscribers decreasing. You’re going for engaged, interested readers who care about your business and what you offer.
Get rid of spam traps
There is a good intention behind spam traps, but not being aware of them can be harmful to an email sender. Internet service and blacklist providers create spam traps, also known as honey pots, to lure spammers in order to block them.
You wouldn’t know if you had spam traps on your list because they appear just like any other email address. Spammers scrape them online and email them, thus revealing their carelessness and malicious intentions.
To avoid spam traps, build your email list organically and never add people to it without permission. Also, if you think your database may contain any spam traps, it’s a good idea to run it through an email verification service. Otherwise, you risk being mistaken for a spammer, added to an email blacklist and blocked.
Verify new contacts in real time
While validating your list is something you should do at least quarterly, it pays to have a system in place that checks every new subscriber’s contact in real time. This way, you can make sure that the email addresses you gather are valid and real. An email validation API will help you do just that: get good data in the first place.
Getting started with an API shouldn’t be hard. Talk to your email validation company and ask for your API key, which is a code you will embed on your platform. Once active on your signup forms, the API validates every new email address instantly before it’s added to your list.
Test your mail server and inbox placement
The technology around email deliverability continues to evolve and has led to some helpful tools. These tools help you make sure your email is in the best shape before it goes out to your subscribers.
For instance, our mail server tester at ZeroBounce checks if your mail server is configured correctly. If it’s not, it could lead to deliverability issues.
Once you cross that off the list, you can try the inbox placement tester which gives you feedback on your potential deliverability. You send an email to all of the major email service providers to see where your email will land. Now you can know and improve your emails – before you hit Send!
Learn more about your audience
The more detailed information you have about your audience, the better you can strategize. One crucial piece of information is knowing when your subscribers were last active.
You can learn about your readers’ overall email engagement, such as how often they open, click through emails, and even how often they unsubscribe. Using this information, which our Activity Data tool provides, you can work on targeting specific audiences and personalize your content more effectively.
The best email marketers make use of the right tools
Building a good email list means taking advantage of the technology that is out there. These applications exist for good reasons and the email marketers who use them reap the benefits of more engagement which results in a higher ROI.
All of these tools are about maximizing your investment of time, effort and money. The best email newsletters reach their full potential when data quality and deliverability get the attention they require.
About the Author
Liviu Tanase is the founder and CEO of email validation and deliverability company ZeroBounce. As a serial entrepreneur, he founded five companies and has participated in three exits creating quadruple-digit returns. Liviu writes about digital marketing and technology, focusing on email communication. His goal is to help make email marketing work for your business.
