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| Don't Neglect Your List - Find Out What You Are Missing! |
By:
Chris Hane |
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Managing lists of emails is difficult on a good day - are you doing it correctly? If you're online you are probably using a service of some type. Are you getting the most from your email list - do you even know what the email list should be doing for you?
While list management probably ranks up there as one of the most dullest topics, running a successful business is about mastering these core details or outsourcing the whole shebang 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. Most of the services we have seen do this adequately enough most of the time. But in this day and age, you really should expect more than that (particularly for what some of those services charge!).
So what are the advanced functions that you should be looking to take advantage of daily in your business. First, you should have a mechanism to 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 effective technique should be easy to use. The first benefit is you don't continually send them messages for the product they just purchased. Now you can get to the important work of selling them the nex product. More importantly, the contact should not have to perform the double opt in again. They either opted in already or they just purchased form you - they want to hear from you.
Second, you need the ability to the same message to several email lists at the same time. The key is to make sure the message is sent only ONCE to your customer even if they are on several lists. We call this multisend. We have seen lots of services that will not perform this de-duplication prior to sending and it doesn't help your image. In reality, duplicate messages could seriously damage your reputation depending on the expectations of your contacts.
A third powerful feature that most large companies use is sampling (aka testing). If you have an email list of 5,000 addresses, is it easy to sample send an email to 300 customers and track the results (opens, etc). Sample and split testing large lists before rolling out a large campaign is a key technique in any marketer's bag of tricks (note I didn't say online exclusively). Offline marketing has used sampling to prove out different ideas since marketing was first practiced. You need to 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 pieces 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)? |
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