In this article, we will provide you with a list of email marketing best practices (in no particular order) that will help you build and maintain the best ESP mailing list possible.
A strong mailing list can increase your email marketing ROI and position your business for digital success. But remember, that also in this case the golden rule quality over quantity applies.
That means, that you should never buy a mailing list on the internet, keep your own lists clean and organically grow it using customized opt-in forms and make sure to apply permission-based tactics such as Double-opt in.
Never use purchased mailing lists
While this may seem like a quick and easy way to start with your email marketing campaign, the downsides outweigh the benefits by far.
The most important thing for a successful email campaign is to make sure that your subscribers are engaged and reading content. You don't want your emails to end up in a Spam folder and lower your email deliverability rate and trustworthiness.
This is the exact opposite of what happens when you buy an email list since these are emails that are available on the internet for anyone to purchase. So most likely, these people won't engage with your content and didn't ask you to send them an email.
That can lead also to other problems, particularly in Europe as data protection rules like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) are being enforced.
The recommendation would be to slowly steadily build a list of users actually interested in your content using Show newsletter sign-up forms on your website.
Never scrape or crawl websites for email addresses
While this might sound like an easy way to get a massive number of emails within a short amount of time, it is not without its downsides. There are many drawbacks to collecting emails using web scraping technologies.
The biggest drawback is the availability of these emails to anyone that's scraping them. This most likely means that they are already receiving a large number of email campaigns and can lead to the recipients marking your newsletter as spam. If a lot of people mark your emails as spam, this can lead to you getting blacklisted by email servers and ISPs.
You should be focusing your time on growing your own mailing lists instead. Having an email opt-in form on your website is the best way to go. Users that are subscribing to your mailing lists on your website are also consenting to receive newsletters from you and thus are much less likely to mark your messages as spam.
Emails should only be sent to people that have opted into receiving your emails on your website. Piano ESP helps you manage this by ensuring users need to opt-in to receive your newsletters.
Every email should contain an Unsubscribe link
This best practice is not only about having a clean mailing list. Having an Unsubscribe link in your newsletters has other benefits, including avoiding customer frustration. Users that would like to unsubscribe from marketing emails should have the option to do so. This will do much less damage to your mailing list reputation than users marking your newsletters as spam.
Piano ESP allows you to easily add an Unsubscribe link to all your email campaigns. In addition, our Analytics section in the ESP dashboard allows you to view the source of the user's unsubscription that can help you identify, for example, if your mailing list contains bad email addresses.
Once a user unsubscribes from your mailing list or email campaign, you should not be sending them any further emails unless they explicitly re-subscribe through one of the available options:
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Via email through a re-subscribe link in any previously received email
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Via a newsletter opt-in form on your website
Remove unengaged subscribers
Having a clean and healthy mailing list that contains mostly engaged subscribers is important for successful email campaigns.
You should definitely consider reviewing your mailing lists a couple of times per year. Also, you should clean your mailing lists if you notice a spike in bounce rates (soft or hard bounces) in any ESP Analytics graphs.
Piano ESP offers you an Audience page, where you can filter your mailing lists for example based on Email opens.
From this section, you can also download all your active subscribers of a mailing list and review it for duplicate email addresses, typos, or invalid email addresses.
Removing incorrect email addresses from your mailing lists is important, as these may cause higher bounce rates, and the higher this rate is, the more it affects your sender reputation and deliverability of your email campaigns.
General recommendations
In addition to following the above best practices, we also recommend the following for your email campaigns:
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do not send only promo/ad content in your newsletter - this can lead to disengaged users and higher spam complaint rates
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do not send the same content, twice and more per day - again this increases the risks of the newsletter being flagged for spam
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use dynamic subject lines, as we have in our default ESP campaign settings that you can find more details about here