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Email Best Practice Central: Email List Best Practices

[August 08, 2005]

Email Best Practice Central: Email List Best Practices

By Helen Ching, VP Marketing, Digital Connexxions Corp.

Email Best Practice Central is where you can learn the best practices for each aspect of email marketing.

There are eight articles in this series:
? Email Best Practice Central: Email List Best Practices
? Email Best Practice Central: Email Campaign Best Practices
? Email Best Practice Central: Creative and Editorial Best Practices
? Email Best Practice Central: Email Delivery Best Practices
? Email Best Practice Central: Email Testing Best Practices
? Email Best Practice Central: Email Tracking Best Practices
? Email Best Practice Central: Email Newsletter Best Practices
? Email Best Practices Central: Privacy Best Practices

For this article, we are concentrating on the email list. Use the following best practices to ensure you have the best email list to help you meet your marketing objectives:

1. Highlight benefit of email to invite opt-in.
2. Make opt-in easy, and fast. Generally, the time it takes for a subscriber to subscribe should be less than 3 minutes. Anything longer than that, you risk abandonment.
3. Show a sample of what you are offering, before asking for the email address. Even if it were free, people would like to see what “it” looks like.
4. Use email append with care. Email append with verification, reference existing relationship, then invite to communicate online in the future.
5. Incorporate email subscription on every page of your website to increase visibility.
6. Monitor ongoing customer attitude with polls or surveys. If they continue to like your product and/or services, your list will remain current. If they do not, your list will become out of date very quickly.
7. Put privacy policy into the email subscription path, to ensure that each subscriber understands up front how his profile information will be used.
8. Ask for preferences, as this is the best way to collect profile information and learn about your subscribers.
9. Maintain email list hygiene on a regular basis – any change in email, postal address, status, and any other profile information should be updated in databases across the company.
10. When you receive a request for unsubscribe, remove from the list immediately.
11. Retain existing customers by making it easy for them to update their profile. This can be achieved through a button on the website, or a link at the bottom of each of email communication.

Helen Ching is the VP of Marketing at Digital Connexxions Corp., a provider of email and data services for publishers, list managers, and direct marketers. She can be reached at [email protected].

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