Collecting customer contact information is something almost all businesses do. They do this for their email marketing efforts or to have a better picture of who their customers are. If your business is like most, there is a good chance that you have a bloated mailing list. This is a mailing list with contacts that no longer serve any purpose. Below, we will look at how you can keep your mailing list lean and up to date.
Table of Contents
Check Email Open Rates
Most email software will give you detailed statistics on the open rates of your emails. If you dig further, you will find out who on your mailing list has not been opening your emails. Here you can choose to do two things. First, you can get in touch to ask why they have not been opening your emails and what you can do to rectify the situation. You can also ask them if they would like to remain on your mailing list. If they do not reply, you should do the second thing, which is removing them from the mailing list.
Check for Duplicate Contacts
Sometimes, people sign up for mailing lists using the same name but different email addresses. Once you go through your list of contacts, you should be able to find these people easily and, therefore, either merge their contact information or remove one of the entries.
To ensure you are not removing important information, send an email to all duplicate contacts, letting them know of the duplicate contacts and ask them which one you should delete. For those who do not send a reply, remove the older contact information.
Segment Your Lists
If you have a specialized email list, you should have just the segment of people you would like to send the email to on these lists. These may be groups of people in different demographics or people with the same interests. Once you have segmented the people in your email list, you can use PieSync to sync all these different lists to different email providers and even all your devices. Piesync allows you to do this easily, so you have the latest contacts and email lists on all your devices.
Once you have all these lists on all your devices, you can subscribe add them to different specialized mailing lists, so they receive just the emails that are important to them.
Check for Hard Bounces
A hard bounce is where the email is undelivered. There can be a few reasons for this including someone changing their email address or moving jobs. These contacts will fill your email list and may not be helpful to you. Once you notice some emails not being delivered to specific email addresses, wait a few hours or days, and then send the emails again. For the emails that go undelivered, that is a hard bounce, which is permanent, and these contacts need to be removed.
For the email that goes through the second time around, that is a soft bounce, which represents temporary issues that got resolved.
It is important to keep your mailing list lean. This will save you time and the effort it would take mailing people who would never see or open your emails.
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