7 Mistakes You Can Make in Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Building a list
Little did I know when I started learning about Email Marketing that it would be this never-ending, ever-changing space of communication. I thought, “It’s just sending emails to people…right?”. Well, yes and no because there are so many questions you have to ask yourself and people to communicate effectively to them. We are going to focus on one today and that is – Building an Email List.
Building a List
Building a list takes time and effort and is not something you can buy your way into. You need to give people the opportunity to sign-up for your newsletter or class. You want people to are interested in your product or service to sign-up.
Pro Tip: Warning Bells should be going off in your head if you’re hearing this from someone on your team or a vendor.
I have a list of 4,000 emails that we can send to” don’t worry.
Your response – How did you get this list? Are they our target audience?
I got this list from a friend of mine that we can use.
Your response – These people signed up for your friends list not ours. Do we have permission to email them?
They inform you the 10,000 people on their list took over 15 years to build.
Your response – 10 years? Most of this list is probably out of date. When was the last time it was scrubbed?
“Building a list takes time and effort and is not something you can buy your way into.”
I will send the emails from my account so they will recognize the name.
Your response – Personal email accounts are not meant to push out bulk emails and you will get blocked if not blacklisted by your email provider.
We can compile all of our emails and let the email service (Mail Chimp) scrub the list for us.
Your response – Not a bad idea, but a poorly targeted list runs the risk of too many SPAM indications which will lead to a frozen account. Many companies have a threshold of 0.4% for SPAM. If you get more than that, they freeze your account and ask you how and why is this happening. They could delete your account completely.
We should send out emails about our campaign daily for the entire month.
Your response – Are you sure you’ve communicated to your audience that they are signing up for a daily email? Many people who sign up think they will be contacted once a week or once per month. If you start to send them daily emails and they were not notified of that, they may unsubscribe.
I know Jim, and he would want this information, so I’m going to just add his name to the list.
Your response – We do not have Jim’s permission to email him in this manner. It would wiser to email him directly and ask him to sign-up to receive our marketing emails. Then we’d have his permission.
What should happen next: Discuss your email list
Determine the health, validity, and permissions of your list before you start to use it. It’s best to start with a list that is half of the original size that is healthy than to just try to get a large number of emails sent out.
What should not happen: Let yourself be talking into using a bad list because it’s a large number.
Once you start with a bad email list, it’s going to be really difficult to weed out the bad from the good once you start combining the two.
Need help getting started? Contact Studio490 today to start a conversation today!