Are You Managing Your List?

There are lots of ways to manage your email lists

. Since your online, you are more than likely using a hosted email service. Are you getting the most from your email list - do you even know what the email list should be doing for you?

Managing your email list is probably one of if not the most unintersing process. Yet, running a successfull business is about mastering these fundamental details or outsourcing them to experts. In fact, it is the rare business that will be successful without executing on these items. Let's start with what it means to manage your email list.

Where do you start? Most people maintain a grouping of emails addresses (and contact information if you have it) that you can send emails to. There are a lot of hosted providers out there and the best that can be said is they do an adequate job. Be aware that a lot are not even adequate. But in this day and age, you really should expect more than that (particularly for what some of those services charge!).

What advanced features should you be looking for? Here is our list of required features you should be looking to utilize daily in your business processes. First, and this is key, you must have a mechanism automatically move your contacts from one list to another based on actions your contacts have with your company. If someone purchases a product, they should be unsubscribed from the list trying to sell them that product and automatically subscribed to another list. This is a powerful technique. The first benefit is you don't continually send them messages for something they just purchased. More importantly you can work to sell them the next product. More importantly, the contact should not have to perform the double opt in again. They want to hear from you. They have already opted in or have an existing relationship - don't make them do it again!

A second feature you should look for is the ability to send the same message to multiple email lists at the same time AND ensure that a contact receives the message only ONCE even if they are on several email lists - we call this multisend. Most services that we have come across do not perform de-duplication prior to sending. Image what your customers think when they receive the same message several times. In reality, it could seriously harm your reputation depending on the expectations of your customers.

The third feature that big name corporations use is sampling (aka testing). Sampling is powerful! If you have a list of 10,000 names, is it easy to sample send an email to 500 prospects and track the results (opens, receiveds, etc). Sample and split testing large lists before rolling out a large campaign is a mandatory technique in any marketer's toolkit (note I didn't say online exclusively). Offline marketing has used sampling to test out different messages since marketing was first thought of. You must be able to use split testing online and offline easily.

You will receive advice to go ahead and blast your email list and maybe to record the results. This is a guaranteed way to fatigue your list. Besides, seeing the same message with perceived slight changes (e.g., your subject line), could actually harm you with your contacts. Sampling different communications is a much better practice and large enterprises spend tons of money testing before rolling out a full campaign. How powerful would it be for you to do the same thing and test your messages before rolling out a large campaign!

The final feature you should be looking for is how to take your list offline. While email is great, different forms of communication are potentially more effective. Can your list management software facilitate offline communication such as a print campaign (e.g, postcard, letter, newsletter) or depending on your business personal contact (e.g., phone call or phone survey)?

by: Chris Hane

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