Keep your data clean, and clean your data regularly.

You can waste a lot of energy and money by emailing to customers whose data is not cleaned.

Before you send, make sure you know where your email contacts have come from.

Good practice dictates that you should always look to grow your email list organically, from contacts who have signed up directly to you through your site or through your direct marketing and promotional material.

Where possible get them to double opt-in through your email service by. This means that when they sign up and are then prompted to confirm their email sign up online. By opting in twice they show a better level of interest and as long as your content is relevant and interesting, you should be able to market to them more efficiently.

Double opt in also protects you from malicious reporting as a SPAMMER. If someone reports your emails as spam, their double opt-in history can be used to prove they were aware of what you would be emailing. It is always useful to protect your online reputation and this is a good system to use for that reason alone.

 

Only use trusted email lists.

I would caution against the use of 'purchased email lists' or if you are looking to buy email lists from third parties. If a small percentage of these lists report you as spam, you can quickly become blacklisted and unable to send any e-mails from your email client - which impacts on your time and money.

Would you respond well to emails from unknown parties?

Understand that growing email lists happens over a period of time and is the result of a combination of other marketing methods.

Don’t panic if you find people are unsubscribing from your e-mails. They are doing you a favour by

showing you they are not likely to answer your call to actions. As long as they opt out, rather than report

you for SPAM, this will not affect your reputation. It only helps to clean your list of contacts interested

in your e-mails.

Send a yearly 'clean up' email that asks people to update their information and unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive your emails (though this should always be a link in your email anyway). It's not about how big your list is, but rather about how responsive that list is.

How do you currently store or manage your customer email information?
If you use a CRM database (customer relationship management) who is responsible for making sure the data is correct, are your sales team or colleagues adding in data correctly?
Clean data is a product of everyone's behaviour so try to make sure this is put into practise.

An effective way to clean data is to pull reports showing the least active openers and split test your emails to these lists to see if different content, layout or special offers increase clicks or call to action responses. 

How clean is your data?