Keeping an email marketing list with your prospects active can sometimes feel like an uphill battle. It’s one thing to find the right prospect, but it’s another thing entirely to keep them engaged. With the average email marketing open rate between just 15-25%, how can you ensure you’re not falling on deaf ears? We rounded up some of our best tips to keep your audience engaged, included below in order of importance:

    • Correct Bounced Emails: This may seem like an obvious tip, but it’s the most important. Emails bounce for a number of reasons, but you should never ignore a hard bounce. This type of bounce is caused by a permanent error — either the email address is invalid because the contact is no longer at the company or they may have previously unsubscribed. Before you begin your next email marketing campaign, create a list of previously bounced contacts and correct any soft bounces, while also removing any hard bounces. Continuing to email bounced contacts can hurt your email marketing reputation and have a negative impact on future campaigns.
    • Remove Unengaged Contacts: There’s the old marketing adage that it takes seven impressions to convert a prospect, but I’m also going to remind you that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. If you’ve emailed a prospect at least ten times and they’ve yet to open any of your email marketing campaigns, it’s probably safe to assume they never will. At this point, you need to remove them from your email marketing list. If the company is a true prospect, find another contact and add them to your list. You want to avoid the spray and pray approach here — it’s important to source a qualified lead (that’s someone who has purchasing power) and build a relationship with them. There are a number of benefits here, but most importantly it protects your integrity.
    • Add Additional Contacts (Regularly): Keeping a robust email marketing list requires a ton of research, and unfortunately there isn’t really an easy way to get around this, but that doesn’t mean you should let your list remain static and collect dust. The tips I’ve included above will help you avoid the churn and burn, but you need to take the time to regularly locate prospects. I like to use Crunchbase to source up-and-coming companies and then verify their credentials with Hunter. Which brings me to my next point…
    • Never Purchase Email Marketing Lists: And I mean never! I cannot stress this enough. First of all, it’s actually illegal and there are some pretty hefty fines if you get caught. Good email addresses aren’t for sale and emailing any list that you’ve purchased can hurt your email marketing reputation (thus impacting your domain). Not to mention, your email marketing provider can also penalize you for doing so, which in some cases may result in a permanent ban from using their service. I know email marketing lists often seem like an easy way to solve your problem but building a quality list only comes as the result of a lot of hard work.

Building a great email marketing list requires time and energy, but if done correctly, you’ll surely reap the rewards. After all, nothing worth having comes easily. Here at Voxus, email marketing is a core strategy not only for our outbound campaigns, but for many of our clients as well. To learn more, contact us today.