Email is one of the most important communication tools for many organizations.

Even in the era of social media and instant messaging, email remains one of the most effective methods of communicating with large audiences.

A 2020 survey by Statista found that there was a return of £35.41 for every £1.00 spent on email marketing.

But these kinds of results don’t happen by accident.

A well-managed mailing list is essential as the foundation of an effective email marketing campaign.

In this article, we’ll discuss email list management best practices for building, segmenting, and personalising your electronic mailing list as well as strategies for keeping it clean and up to date.

What is an electronic mailing list and how does it work?

An electronic mailing list is a collection of email addresses from people that have opted-in and agreed to receive emails from your organization. A healthy email list is important if you want to see success from your email marketing activities.

In the early days of email marketing, it was typical for all the recipients of an electronic mailing list to receive the same message from a business.

But with modern email management solutions, it’s best practice to segment your mailing list using criteria like demographics, location and buying behaviour.

Working with email management solutions that support segmentation enables you to deliver more relevant emails to the recipients on your mailing list and improve the performance of your email marketing.

How to build an email list

Building an email list may feel like a daunting task to some people.

Generating thousands of subscribers is very rarely something that happens overnight. Patience and hard work are key.

We’ve put together a few methods that can help you build your electronic mailing list.

Newsletter sign-up on your website

Make it easy for people that are visiting your website and enjoying your content to sign up to your list.

Have a clear, attention-grabbing call to action that prompts people to sign up. Don’t hide your email list sign-up form at the bottom of your footer!

One email list management best practice is to include the use of modals or slide-in banners on your website that clearly state the benefits of becoming part of your email list, to help prompt engaged site users to sign up.

Social media promotions

Your social media channels can also help you build your email list.

Some channels like LinkedIn and Facebook give you the ability to run ‘lead generation’ ads. With a lead gen ad, a recipient will typically sign up for your email list in exchange for a valuable piece of content you’ve provided.

The success of Lead Gen ads really depends on the value of the content you provide as your ‘lead magnet’, but it can be an effective way to build up email subscribers.

Organic social media can also help you build your list. You might consider running a promotion that encourages your followers to sign up for your newsletter to receive an exclusive discount.

In-person events

If you ever exhibit at trade shows, exhibitions or conferences, make sure to collect email addresses from the people who visit your stand.

To keep data secure, it’s often email list management best practice to use an electronic device like a tablet to collect email addresses in person.

Email list management best practices

Once the number of contacts in your list starts building, there are certain best practices to follow to ensure you get the best out of your email marketing efforts and adhere to all relevant legislation.

Make sure you meet all legal requirements

The most important step in email list management is to make sure you comply with all local legislation.

In the UK, this means making sure you adhere to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive.

One of the important things to remember is that you should only process the data for customers that have directly opted into your email list, or that meet another legal basis for processing data under the GDPR.

You should also make it easy for any subscribers to opt out of your email list at any time.

Design an onboarding strategy

When subscribers first join your mailing list, your ‘welcome series’ of emails can really help set the tone for their experience with your organization.

The first email should ideally welcome them to your list and set their expectations for what they are likely to receive from you in the future.

You might use the next two emails to help illustrate your brand story, what makes you unique and the value you offer to customers. You might also introduce your email preference centre at this point, to allow customers to let you know the types of emails they are interested in receiving.

You can then tailor future emails based on the subscribers’ preferences.

Prioritise quality over quantity

Making sure you manage expectations properly and only send emails that are relevant to subscribers is the key to building long-lasting relationships with the people on your email list.

Sending a high volume of emails to an audience that is uninterested and disengaged is likely to lead to high spam reports and high unsubscribes. These are both things that can impact your email deliverability.

Sending emails that are highly relevant to each recipient is the secret to developing a healthy email list. You can achieve this through personalization and segmentation in your mailing list manager.

Personalise your emails and campaigns

By including personalized details such as the recipient’s name, or the products they have recently shown an interest in, you can build a more personal connection with the people on your email list.

Personalisation can also improve the performance of your emails.

A study by Campaign Monitor found that people were 26% more likely to open emails with personalized subject lines. So personalization within your email list manager is important.

Segment your email list

Segmentation is one of the most important things you can do to optimise the performance of your emails and maintain a healthy email list.

By tailoring your emails to your subscribers’ details and preferences, you can deliver more targeted content that really resonates with them. This will increase the relevancy and lead to more opens, clicks and conversions, as well as reduce spam complaints.

Common segmentation methods for email list management best practices include:

• Demographics (age, gender)
• Location
• Purchase behaviour
• Interests
• Stage in the customer lifecycle

Make it easy to unsubscribe

Including an easy, simple way to unsubscribe from your emails is necessary if you’re going to comply with current legislation.

Including an easy unsubscribe has the additional benefit of reducing the number of spam complaints which can have a positive impact on your overall deliverability.

Deal with inactive subscribers

Your sender reputation matters in email marketing.

If you continue to send emails to inactive subscribers on your email list, you are artificially reducing your own open rate.

If a subscriber is inactive for a period of time consider sending them a re-engagement email to try and encourage them to start interacting with your email again. This might include a personalized message such as “We miss you!...” with an incentive like an offer or promotion to get them opening and clicking through.

If the recipient doesn’t engage with this approach, you might consider moving them to an ‘inactive’ segment or removing them from your list completely.

Let users manage their preferences

Preference management is another email list management best practice that allows your subscribers to have control over the frequency and types of emails they receive.

Your subscribers should ideally be prompted to update their preferences in your email preference centre during their onboarding stage and reminded at regular intervals.

By understanding how often recipients want to be contacted and the type of email they would like to receive, you can improve your relevancy and overall email performance.

Track your results

You should keep an eye on important metrics like bounces and undeliverable messages, and take steps to remove these records from your database.

Tracking your email marketing results is also important for understanding what works and what doesn’t.

You should also ensure that any links in your emails have the correct tracking parameters for your chosen analytics platform. This can help you measure things like dwell time and the conversions that come from each of your emails

Some mailing list management platforms can also help you understand metrics such as open rates, click-through rates and the performance of different elements of your emails which can help you optimise even further and make data-driven decisions to improve your email campaigns.

What about using email list software?

Choosing the right email list software is important for helping you to effectively manage your email subscriber list.

It’s important to choose a mailing list manager that can help support you with subscriber forms, segmentation, and the analysis of important deliverability data.

At Simplelists, we pride ourselves on making email list management easy.

We’ve got everything you need to set up, build, and manage an effective electronic mailing list. And it’s simple for anyone to get started.

Curious to find out more?
Sign up for our one-month free trial.

Using Simplelists - a group email manager - means you can send emails to a group of people via one email address. This is a great way to have private discussions via email in a way that ensures list members’ preferences are adhered to (e.g. how frequently they receive messages). Lots of businesses and organisations find that sharing information in this way can foster community in the workplace. This short post explains in some more detail how the service works and what benefits it offers.

How does it work?

First, members need to subscribe to the discussion list. They can do this on a website (see an earlier post on how to add a subscribe form to your website) or via email. It is then possible for any member to post to the whole list by emailing a particular, automated email address.

You can set permissions so that only certain members can post, or enable an approval process so that each post needs to be moderated by an administrator before going out to the whole list (read more here about how to set permissions). Normally, you would have one or more 'list managers’ who take charge of the list and tend to have a good level of knowledge about what the discussion is all about.

Making things personal

It is possible for list members to personalise how they interact with the list. For example, they might have an email format preference (HTML or plain text), or they might want to stipulate how often they receive emails from the list. There is also the option to receive a digest summary of the latest posts, instead of receiving them individually as and when they are posted.

You can also customise the email itself, perhaps including a company logo or a directing email recipients to a bespoke landing page within your website.

Getting through

Today, most ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have limits on the number of email addresses that you can send an email to. If you exceed the number, the email will not be delivered to the recipient. If recipients report your emails as spam, this can also affect whether or not the message gets through.

Within Simplelists, you can manage your spam reporting settings to make sure your emails get through.

A lot of people still prefer receiving an email personalised to their needs rather than visiting a website to search for information. Over half of all internet users subscribe to at least one email list. For those with slow internet connections or who work offline at intervals, being able to download, read and reply to emails rather than interact in real time can be a real bonus.

What is a subscribe form?

A subscribe form (sign-up form, email opt-in form) is an embedded/hosted web form that you can put on your website, blog or social media pages so that people can enter their details into the form to sign up to your list/email group. Normally, the form is very straightforward and only has a few fields to get the information needed. Name and email address are most important.

Importantly, this is a way to collect email addresses with permission. The person completing the form is actively agreeing that you can send him or her emails sent to your list. This is good news in terms of abiding by rules related to spam, as well as hopefully resulting in more visits to your website and/or participation in group discussions via clicks from your emails.

Creating a form using Simplelists

First, you need to copy the code from Simplelists. Sign into Simplelists and navigate to 'general settings’ and then the 'subscriptions’ tab. Scroll down to 'web subscriptions’, select the code and copy it. Next, you need to paste the code into your website. Open your website editor and paste the code where you want to the form to appear. This should be somewhere between the <body> and </body> tags. In this short video, you can see the code pasted into a div created for this purpose.

Styling your form

Finally, you can style your form by using CSS to change how your form looks. This means that you can make it match perfectly with the design of your website. You can also edit the HTML to adjust your form. For example, you could add a title above the form or remove some of the form options, to simplify it. You might like to remove the daily digest summary option, the unsubscribe option and/or the notes box. If you remove these three lines of code, you would be left with a form that allows users to leave just their name and email address.

It is a good idea to put your form in a visible place on your site where you receive the most visitors. Examples include: the top side bar of your website/blog, the top navigation bar, the footer, on your 'About’ page, etc.

That’s all there is to adding a subscribe form to your website - simple.

If you are using Simplelists for marketing, you will understand the importance of having a healthy email list to ensure that you can contact a range of clients and drive success in your business. If you are just starting a business, building a list of contacts or 'members’ can be a challenge, especially at a time when your customers are receiving other marketing messages in their inbox and becoming more sensitive to spam. Despite these challenges, there are some simple and effective ways to develop a relevant list of members who will want to receive your emails.

Make it easy for people to sign up to your list

There are several ways that you can encourage people to sign up (’opt-in’) to receiving your emails. You could put a form on your website - make sure it looks 'clean’ and matches the rest of the site, place it near the top of the page, and add a short piece of text to explain 'what’s in it for them’ if they sign up. You can read one of earlier posts that explains how to create a subscribe form for your site, using Simplelists. Try not to ask for too much information at this stage - an email address is really all you need, although asking for a first name will also allow you to personalise your emails when you contact them.

Other places you could consider placing a subscribe form are: after blog posts, in your site’s footer, on your 'About’ page, or in a popup box (although browsers tend to discourage pop-ups these days as people can find them irritating). You can also use social media to encourage people to sign up and/or visit your website. If you are a keen blogger, writing guest blogs accompanied with a sign-up form can also work well.

Sign up at the point of sale or when completing other forms

If your website/product requires people to set up an account or fill in a form on your website, you could also incorporate email list sign-up into this process. Make sure that the reason/incentive for registering is clear though, and relevant to your target audience. You could make it as simple as including a check box that reads 'Subscribe to our mailing list?’ that they can check when registering.

Word of mouth/events

It can be effective to offer those people who have been on your list for a while a small incentive or discount that may encourage them to tell others about your site/product. Make sure you ask for the friend’s email address and first name (again, to allow personalisation).

Let them know what to expect

It is good practice to make sure that your customers know exactly what to expect when they subscribe to your list. You should let them know what to expect with regards email frequency and content, and reassure them that they can unsubscribe at any time. It is a good idea to familiarise yourself with the law surrounding email marketing so that you don’t break any of the rules.