Clean Your List



Cleaning your list also means sifting through the messages that "bounce back" to you after a mailing, and deciding which ones should be removed from your list completely, and which ones you might want to try mailing again.

"Bounced" messages, for whatever reason, weren't successfully delivered to the intended recipient. Most can be categorized as either "soft" bounces or "hard" bounces.

? Soft bounces: These are messages that couldn't be delivered at the time they were sent, but may be deliverable at some time in the future. These types of bounces are usually caused by the recipients' ISPs being busy or their inboxes being full.

? Hard bounces: These are messages that can never be delivered. Hard bounces are usually caused by the user typing in an incorrect e-mail address when opting in to your list, or the subscriber no longer using the e-mail address they originally opted in with.

Delete hard bounces immediately. If you leave these addresses in your list, you'll just have to wade through unnecessary bounce messages every time you send a mailing, and that's a waste of your valuable time.

Plus, if you continue to send e-mail to an address that's invalid, you can get into real trouble. Dead addresses are used as spam traps, and if you're found to be repeatedly sending messages to one of these addresses, you could have a problem with the ISP receiving them.

E-mails that are returned as soft bounces, on the other hand, are the result of a temporary problem, so you'll want to re-send your promotions to all the soft bounce addresses a couple of days later. You'll be surprised how many messages get delivered on the second try. And since you've already written the e-mail, there's almost no extra work on your part.

Divide Your List to Conquer More Subscribers

Given the mountains of e-mail people receive these days, most only want to see what's relevant. And, unfair as it may seem, anything irrelevant could be considered spam, and reported as such.

If the people on your list know the message you're sending is something they want, they'll open it!

Using e-mail to target different segments of your audience is one of the single most effective ways to market products or services on the internet. A 2006 report by MarketingSherpa found that e-mail marketers using segmentation saw click-through rates that are 72% higher than e-mail marketers who aren't segmenting their opt-in lists.

You can segment them by whether or not they've bought from you, where they live, the brands they've bought, their age group, etc. There's no end of ways to segment your audience depending on the information you've collected--and e-mail automation makes it not only possible, but simple!

Try it and you can just about guarantee that the results of your e-mail marketing efforts will dramatically improve.

Snag Your Recipients' Attention by Using Their Names

If there's a "secret" to getting e-mail recipients' attention, it's this: Personalize the subject line. No other single technique will boost the response rate of your e-mails as much as personalization.

Have you ever noticed that a great salesperson will find out your name and then use it every so often while they talk to you? It's a way of establishing trust and building rapport. And the truth of the matter is that nothing gets a person's attention faster than hearing or seeing their own name!

By personalizing your subject lines, you also make your e-mail appear more authentic and safer to open, because recipients will be more likely to view your e-mail as coming from a trusted source.

Unfortunately, typing each individual recipient's name into the subject line of every e-mail you send is just not practical! Once you grow your list to more than 50 or 100 people, it becomes unmanageable. It's way too time consuming.

The good news is that there's great e-mail marketing software available these days that'll help you completely personalize your campaigns automatically, and save you tons of time and effort.