Beginner’s Guide To Creating And Managing An Email Marketing List

If you think emails are bland and boring — think again!

Email marketing is alive and well, and here to stay. Social media may be essential, but email is even more so. The best part of utilizing email marketing is the low costs compared to paid advertising and social ads, along with not needing to keep track of constantly changing algorithms like with social media and search engines.

An email list otherwise referred to as a mailing list, is a curated list of email addresses businesses have of their subscribers. You can use these mailing lists to send personalized campaigns, promotions, special offers, and more to subscribed readers. When used right, your business has a lot to gain through a mailing list. Here is your ultimate guide to creating and utilizing email lists for your business.

Create Sign-up Forms

Before you can go ahead to create your email list and send out email marketing campaigns, you need to acquire the absolutely essential ingredient — the email addresses!

How do you gather the emails of your current clients or potentially interested candidates? You can only acquire them if they give them to you themselves by subscribing to receive emails from you. They can’t, however, if they aren’t prompted to do so anywhere.

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The best way to acquire email addresses is by putting up sign-up forms on your company website (commonly at the bottom of the page).

Assemble And Organize Your Email List

We can’t stress enough the importance of having a clean and healthy email list. That translates to one that is organized — not cluttered — and is regularly filtered to disclude leads that aren’t responsive.

Here are a few important email list organization tasks you should consider doing:

• Segment the hundreds to thousands of contacts into groups. You can sort by the type of content you aim to send subscribers and the interests of each group.
• Clean out your email list once every few months. In that timeframe, you’ll be able to notice who your interested subscribers are and who isn’t opening or reacting to your emails anymore. Be ready to let go of subscribers who have already let go of you and reach out to new prospects instead.
• Use tags and folders for efficient organization. Segmenting into groups is not enough if you don’t attach specific labels and data to the groups to determine how you will make use of the different groups within your campaigns.

Choose A Game Plan

Next up is determining how you want to make use of your email list. It’s time to put that list to good use instead of just letting the contacts collect.

Do you want to do a weekly newsletter or only send updates for promotions and special offers? A combination of both to different audiences? Determine the approach you want to take and then begin acting on it. This will also help you segment your contacts more efficiently once you know what you’ll be sending to who.

If the process starts to seem time-consuming and overwhelming, you can decide to outsource the content production to an agency or freelancers who are specialists in the sphere.

Focus On Subject Lines

Running email marketing campaigns is cost-effective and doesn’t receive interference from algorithms, but that doesn’t make it an easy task to appeal to your subscribers. Simply because your email list decided to subscribe to emails doesn’t guarantee that they will open them unless it sounds interesting.

The subject line is your first, and most important, chance at grabbing their attention. If you can’t think of a catchy subject that still concisely covers the main message you want to convey, you can make use of free subject line generators available online. Don’t gloss over the subject line — it’s your gateway to captivating subscribers.

Make Use Of Email Marketing Tools

Just like other marketing processes, email marketing is no different and is most efficient when you make use of dedicated tools. There are many free and low-cost email marketing tools available in the market today that are optimal to have in your arsenal.

You can’t go wrong with looking into MailChimp and Hubspot, for example. You’ll tap into more resources that will allow you to create and track unique email campaigns and then analyze how they performed.

Look At Analytics

All of your efforts of organizing, managing, and working with your email list will be in vain if you don’t keep track of analytics.

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Take a look at which campaigns are performing more than others, which subscribers are no longer opening your emails, how high your bounce rate it, and so on.

There is an entire ocean of stats to analyze and then use to make changes to your email list and campaigns accordingly.

Now go and make the most out of your email list!

About The Author

Katie Brown is a dedicated marketing strategist and content writer with three years of experience in the digital realm. She writes about a variety of issues related to digital marketing and company growth, and she shares her expertise and experience with others through digital storytelling.