In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first ever email. At this time, no one could have predicted how far email would revolutionize the way we communicate and how integral email would become to our everyday lives.
If we fast-forward to today, it’s estimated that the average person receives more than 100 emails on a daily basis.
But email isn’t just a tool for day-to-day communication; it’s also an important part of many cross-channel marketing strategies. In fact, 90% of companies now consider email essential for their business success.
So, what’s the secret behind email marketing success? It all comes down to your email marketing list. Or, more specifically, the effective segmentation of your email list.
In this article, we’re going to take a deeper look at the topic of email marketing, the importance of email marketing lists, and how to approach the building and segmentation of your email list.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is best described as the use of email to promote products or services and develop relationships with customers and clients.
It has become a key channel in many businesses’ online marketing strategies and is held in high regard due to its low cost, effectiveness at engaging with target audiences, and the strong ROI that can be delivered from the channel.
Another benefit of email marketing as part of your marketing strategy is its easily trackable results, with businesses being able to monitor and optimize around a wide range of metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
But perhaps one of the biggest benefits of email marketing is the ability for businesses to tailor their messaging to their subscribers’ specific needs and preferences through a segmented email list.
What is an email marketing list?
At the heart of every successful email marketing campaign is a high-quality email marketing list.
An email list is a collection of email addresses that have given opt-in consent to receive marketing emails from your business.
Without an email list, you can’t run any email marketing campaigns - so it really is of fundamental importance!
Marketers often focus on growing the size of their email list, and this perspective isn’t without its merits, as a larger list gives you more opportunity to reach people with your messages.
But it’s crucial not to overlook the importance of quality when it comes to email marketing lists.
For example, a list of 10,000 subscribers with a low engagement rate is likely to deliver weaker performance than a list of 5,000 highly engaged subscribers.
Maintaining a healthy, high-quality email list can also improve the deliverability of your email marketing campaigns, as you’re less likely to receive unsubscribe requests and spam complaints.
Building your email list: a guide for getting started
Now that we’ve established the importance of maintaining a high-quality email marketing list, let’s take a look at how you can start building a contact list organically.
Establish your goals and objectives
There are different types of email lists, which all achieve different objectives.
The most important place to start is by defining what you want to achieve with your email marketing and establishing clear goals.
By defining your goals and objectives early will not only guide your list-building strategies, but can also influence your email campaign content and the metrics you measure and optimize for success.
Understand compliance and data governance
Before you jump straight into building your email list, it’s important to ensure you’ve got a clear understanding of the email privacy regulations that cover your geographic location.
We’ve put together a full guide on GDPR compliance for businesses in the EU, and it’s also worth getting up to speed on PECR and CAN-SPAM.
By making sure you fully understand what you need to do to keep your subscriber data safe and your email activity compliant, you can stay on the right side of the law and avoid any fines or reputational damage.
Make it easy to sign up
It’s amazing how many businesses talk about wanting to grow their email lists but then realise that the only place people can sign up for their list is at the very bottom of the footer of their website!
Consider including your opt-in email form in prominent locations across your site, and maybe even experiment with pop-up modals and overlays for people browsing for longer than average.
It’s also important to try to keep your opt-in form short and simple to improve your conversion rate.
Offer value in return for an email sign up
This point seems quite obvious, but it’s one that often gets overlooked.
People are more likely to sign up for your email list if they believe that there’s going to be genuine value in doing so.
The value or incentives you offer will vary depending on the nature of your business, but some good examples might be a discount code for an e-commerce business, or access to a white paper or unique research for a B2B service-based business.
Think about unique ways to capture email addresses
Just because email is digital, it doesn’t mean that you can only collect email addresses online.
If your business regularly attends networking events or participates in trade shows and exhibitions - this is another great opportunity to collect valid opt-in email addresses.
To help with compliance (and save some manual data entry time), It’s often a good idea to have a tablet device for collecting email addresses rather than collecting them on a physical form.
The pitfalls of purchasing lists
So, what is email marketing advice regarding purchasing lists? It’s quite simple - don’t do it.
Purchased lists are often low quality, and data can often come from questionable or unverifiable sources.
As a result, purchased lists are likely to contain outdated or inaccurate data, which can lead to high bounce rates and low engagement - ultimately impacting your sender reputation and email deliverability.
Purchasing lists also means that you’re likely to be sending emails to people who haven’t explicitly opted in to receive your marketing communications.
Not only could this potentially alienate the contacts you’re sending emails to and damage your reputation, but it also means you might fail to comply with data privacy regulations.
A purchased email list is also unlikely to perform as well as an organically sourced list.
The general experience of businesses who have purchased lists is that they are a waste of money, with low open rates, click-through rates, and a lower comparative ROI.
So, instead of buying email lists, take the time and effort to build your list organically.
It might take a little longer, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Enhancing engagement with effective segmentation
Once you’re underway with building your list organically, the next logical step to improve email performance is to start segmenting your lists.
Email list segmentation is the process of dividing your contact list into smaller groups based on shared characteristics such as buying behavior, demographics, or interests.
Segmentation helps you deliver more relevant and tailored emails to your audience, which can improve engagement and increase the return you get from your email campaigns.
For example, if you owned a car showroom that sold a variety of different vehicles, you might want to tailor your email content based on your subscribers’ preferences.
You might have different email lists for customers interested in fuel-efficient city cars, those interested in high-performance sports cars, and others interested in family-friendly SUVs.
By tailoring your content accordingly for each of these segments, you’re more likely to reach people with emails that relate to the type of vehicles they are interested in, increasing their likelihood of engaging and taking action.
So, what is email marketing best practice when it comes to segmentation?
The truth is, there is no ‘one size fits all’, and it depends on the nature of your business and the data you hold on your subscribers.
However, typical approaches to segmentation include:
- Geographic segmentation, based on location or language.
- Demographic segmentation, based on factors like age, gender, or occupation.
- Interest-based segmentation, based on topics subscribers have expressed an interest in.
- Behavioural segmentation, based on things like purchasing behavior or time spent on different pages of your website.
Simplelists make it easy to set up and manage multiple contact lists, so you can effortlessly segment your audience for better email performance.
Simplelists: Making email marketing easy
While the majority of customers use the Simplelists platform for group email, our flexibility and range of features also make the platform an ideal choice for businesses looking for a simple yet effective way to manage their email marketing.
With full support for HTML emails, Simplelists allows you to create visually engaging emails that capture attention and drive engagement.
And with the ability to have unlimited lists, you have the freedom to be as granular as you like with email list segmentation.
Our platform is constantly evolving, and more recent functionality includes the ability to connect with your CRM and other business tools to support trigger based emails and ensure your lists are always up to date.
So, if you’re curious about how Simplelists can transform your email marketing, sign up for a one month free trial today.