Is Your List Making Your Email Sick?

Special Guest:

Dan Stevens, CEO/Founder of Kickbox

Agenda

• Why buying or renting a list is not the right approach

• How segmenting/targeting can help

• How to take your list from sick to healthy

• How a healthy list will increase your email effectiveness

To Buy, or not to Buy - that is the question.

Lists - Getting Started

• Your emails help to build and establish a relationship with your recipients

• Email addresses go stale

• Continually building your list is a must

28% of email addresses becomeunreachable on average, within a 12-month period. It is crucial to compensate for list churn and substantially grow your email lists.

- MRSS/Advocacy Institute

Email List Best Practices

• Send what you promised at sign up

• Grow mailing list organically

o Sign up form

o Guest book

o Trade show

• Keep readers coming back for more

• Stay spam law compliant

Email List Best Practices cont.

• Quality lists are NOT built in a day!– Leverage existing network

– Customers past/current

• Build & grow – Constant process

– You can lose up to 28% of your list each year to attrition

• No purchased or rented lists– Purchased lists aren’t a good way to start a relationship (not

allowed by reputable ESPs)

– Bad for delivery

– Against spam laws in other countries

Be Good to Those Sign Ups!

• Mail regularly – at least once per month

• Don’t mail to an address if you haven’t in about 6 months

• Send what you promise!

• Adopt an email privacy policy

• Respect all unsubscribes - It’s better tolose a subscriber than to be markedas a spammer.

NOT to buy, that is the answer!

Segmenting

Segmentation

• Segment lists:

o Better engagement

o Specific events or information

• Your customers areall different

• Improve your email reputation

Segmentation cont.

• A/B split testing

• Non-responders

• Responses

• Open rate

• click-through rate

• Sales conversion

Email Valuation

Email Validation

Email Verification

How a healthy list will increase your email effectiveness

Better content = more engagement = Higher ROI

• Specific list to target the right info to the right people

• New sign ups keep it fresh• Mail often – keep your business in your

customers mind AND help remind them they did sign up

• Keep an eye on reports – watch opens and clicks for engagement, unsubscribes for loss of interest

Now What?

• Small steps – Rome wasn’t built in a day

• Do research now, implement over time

• A/B Split tests are in your future

• Check your analytics more than once a year, they’ll tell you how your changes are working

Resources• VR Marketing Blog verticalresponse.com/blog

• Free Guides verticalresponse.com/marketing-resources

o Testing,Testing 123

o Email Reporting Basics

o List Segmentation: Create Targeted Lists

• Kickbox - kickbox.io• Verticalresponse.com/integrations