The right base of contacts to send your campaigns to has a huge impact on your deliverability. Learn how to effectively acquire contacts, manage your database and send emails in the most efficient way possible.

Contents: 

1. Building contact Base
2. Collecting contact effectively
3. Maintaining database clarity
4. Successful email sending
5. Buying an email database is a no-go

1. Building contact base 

Building an email list full of engaged subscribers will be one of the most effective parts of your email campaign. The most efficient way to grow the lift of emails is to provide persuasive sign-up opportunities across your website, however, to keep your list fresh and relevant to your business you have to take constant care of it by deleting inactive or all-roll addresses and provide segmentation for your customers. 

2. Tips on how to effectively gather contacts

There’s a number of ways you can collect email addresses from your customers: 

• Use custom email opt-in popups – a well-timed, well-positioned, and well-designed popup will quickly see an increase in subscriptions.

• Offer an incentive in exchange for the email address – if you can provide your customer with the content he finds attractive, you can be sure that in exchange for that, he will provide you with the email address. 

• Have multiple locations where the user can sign up – not only your homepage but also the sidebar of blog post, a pop-up, your contact page.

• Use landing pages – when a customer is directed toward your website from an external source and clicks a link to learn more about your business, they are taken directly to a landing page that encourages them to sign up for your list

• Lead magnets – you can promote your lead magnets (such as videos, PDFs, infographics) across your website, social media channels, or with display advertising.

• Leverage your social media – include email sign-up locations on social media and blog posts.

All the above tips will work great if the email provided by the user is real, and he is giving the full consent to receive these emails. That’s exactly why you need to focus on double opt-in procedure. Double opt-in procedure requires a new subscriber to confirm that actually he or she filled that form. After entering the email address in the form, an automatically generated message with an activation link is sent to the address. After clicking on it, the address will be activated and the possibility of delivering emails to this address will be unlocked. By choosing double opt-in, you can be sure that the person who has been added to the list actually is willing to get your emails. It works well for deliverability and affects the quality of the mailing list.

3. Email database clarity

To ensure your email list is always ready to use, you have to make sure it’s neat and clean, and for that, you should:

Delete faulty and inactive contacts  – Sending the email doesn’t mean that it would land in the customer’s inbox successfully. There is always a possibility of messages bouncing back. The bounce rate indicator can be divided into hard bounces (permanent delivery failures, for example when email doesn’t exist) and soft bounces (temporary deliverability failures, such as a full inbox). That’s how you know if the email is active and correct. 

Get rid of all role-addresses – role addresses are administrative email accounts that all companies use to collect incoming emails that should be handled by a particular group or department, such as info@, help@, marketing@, admin@ and so on. 

4. The successful way of email sending

Meeting customers at the point of their need is crucial in marketing strategy. Segmentation helps in targeting mass campaigns to smaller groups of contacts with similar preferences, thus improves the effectiveness and their retention. You can perform email list segmentation based on:

• Behavior – you can track when and what articles, products and categories the customer browses on the website to adjust the content and frequency of messages

• Purchase history – tailor the content of campaign based on what products the customer bought earlier

• Reaction to the previous campaigns – modify the frequency of campaigns based on the amount of campaigns opened in given time

Because of this approach, you keep the customers’ interest longer, reduce the unsubscribe rate while also increase basic ratios such as open rate and CTR. This is crucial, as positive feedback on campaigns improves your reputation as a sender and therefore deliverability. 

5. Why buying email database is fundamentally wrong?

Being on the mission to build the email list as large as possible, you will for sure come across the “opportunity” of buying your list from a third-party. 

• It’s a risky business – by buying such a list you can easily get yourself into spam trap and become listed as a denied sender. 

• It will rarely help you to achieve your email marketing goals – as the contacts from the list won’t be interested in your content, therefore, although you will have tons of contacts, you won’t be able to do anything useful with them.