How to clean up your mailing list

Your mailing list lives and breathes; it shouldn’t stagnate. To maintain its vibrancy, from time to time it will need a clean-up. Read all about it here along with why should my business have a mailing list in the first place and other questions!

Why should my business have a mailing list?

If you don’t have a mailing list or aren’t collecting email addresses, then I recommend starting now. A mailing list is an ‘owned audience.’ These are people who have bought from you or signed up to hear from you. It’s the opposite of, say, paper promotional flyers through your letterbox. That is indiscriminate. You don’t know who lives there or if they’re your target audience. It’s a ‘post and hope’ approach.

Mailing lists comprise people who actually want to hear from you; they’re expecting to hear from you and as they must have signed up to your brand (via a purchase) or the mailing list itself at some point, they are more likely to be your target audience. If you’re not using that list of email addresses to connect with them, you’re missing out on sales opportunities.

What tool should I use to email my audience?

The answer to this question depends on the amount of effort you want to invest and how you want to maximise the email address data.

Use your own email

The easiest way is to email from your business email address, a mass email to all your customers and clients. However, there may be limitations such as

• Saving email groups – you don’t want to be inputting everyone’s email address every time so setting up a group distribution would be good. But your email provider might not allow groups.

• Confidentiality breaches – you must add everyone’s name into the ‘bcc’ field for confidentiality reasons, but it would be easy to make a mistake.

• Formatting limitations – it may be harder to add images and graphics to make the email content appealing.

• Difficult to track – it’s hard to track the percentage of opens and clicks and therefore difficult to assess the success of your email.

• Lack of professionalism – it could appear less professional than one from an email provider such as Mailchimp.

• Proximity to your audience – it’s easy to unsubscribe from an email that comes from a third party such as Mailchimp. When it’s from you, any customers who want to unsubscribe may feel too uncomfortable to do so. We want to make life easy for our customers.

But if your email list is small and you’re just starting out then this is a great way to begin. It feels familiar to you and the recipients, and a huge pro could be that it stands out from the corporate emails jostling for position in customers’ inboxes.

Email marketing platforms and host services

Another way to communicate with your target audience is through email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp, Beehiive and Klaviyo or the mailing service provided by your website host such as Squarespace.

These platforms have many tools which can help you market your products better. I use Mailchimp for my clients so the following benefits are based off my experience with that email platform (this is not an ad!):

• They can collect email addresses as people subscribe and then they’re stored until you delete them. You don’t need to re-input each time.

The audience can be sliced and diced in many ways so that you can target different groups. You can assign tags to email addresses, say, ‘Wales’ and then send marketing material to the Wales group that targets them. Of course, you can email everyone at once too.

• There are clear protocols around email subscription and unsubscription to ensure that you’re always playing by the rules.

• I love that you can track performance of all your emails. How many recipients opened the email? How many people clicked and what did they click on? This helps me deduce what’s working and what’s not and that information helps me in my next email creation for that business. Keep reading for tips on improving your Open Rate!

• Mailchimp is not perfect when it comes to formatting, I admit, but I’ve set up branding colours and logos, and a format that I replicate each time I send an email which makes it easy for me. The repetition of colours, logos and format helps with brand recognition too.

Improving your Open Rate

Whether your email addresses are stored in Excel or a service such as Mailchimp, sometimes the list needs a tidy up. Why? You need to know your open rate (how many people are opening your email) and who’s really reading your content so that you can target your audience better. If you’re working with brands, this information allows you to provide accurate open and click data.

It’s also good housekeeping, may reduce costs and eliminates potential email usage breaches.

Here are some tasks I’ve been carrying out for clients’ mailing lists recently using Mailchimp analytics and tools. This would be harder if you’re sending from your own email but not impossible. I’ll explain what you can do for each task.

• Remove the people who have unsubscribed from your list of contacts. They’re distracting and may be a constant reminder that not everyone devours your emails. They may also add to costs in e.g. Mailchimp. In Excel, if someone has asked to stop receiving your emails, you should have removed them straightaway or added them to a separate tab. If you did the latter, I would delete for the reasons mentioned.

• For one client, the business had collected the email addresses but then abandoned them. I contacted them to say that they had at some point had a relationship with the business, that we hadn’t emailed them, but would they like to start receiving our emails? If we didn’t hear back from them within a month, we were going to delete their email addresses. A handful of people replied to say that they did want to hear from the business, so we picked up some new subscribers which was great! The rest we deleted as we had promised. If you have email addresses in an Excel document that you’ve abandoned, the same approach can be applied.

• In Mailchimp, you can analyse who opens your emails and who doesn’t, and who doesn’t on a regular basis. This is one of my favourites: you can then email the very infrequent openers to check that they’d still like to receive the emails. Of course, this requires a very catchy subject box – if they don’t usually open, you want them to open this one! This is complicated in your personal emails but not impossible, although it would require a fair amount of effort so I’m going to bullet it separately.

• To achieve open email records without using a service like Mailchimp, you would need to track read receipts each time you email and log them in your Excel doc. This is very time consuming if you have a large audience but, like I said, not impossible! You can then analyse the recipients who rarely open and email them to check they’re not just feeling uncomfortable about emailing you directly.

I would also recommend that you have some automated emails in your email marketing platform. These are great for when someone subscribes or buys a product. You can achieve something similar from your own email using a template that you keep in Microsoft Word, but it won’t be automated.

Do you send emails and how do you do it? I would love to hear. Let me know in the comments.