Manage Your Email List With These Best Practices and Software

Building a brand requires hard work, dedication, and constant efforts to maintain connections with your community to ensure their loyalty. Community building is most effective when you can engage with your audience directly–and this is where email marketing steps in!

But managing an email list can feel overwhelming and time-consuming, which leaves you with less time to focus on other aspects of creating or managing your business. That’s one of the top challenges people encounter in the list management process.

Without proper management, email campaigns suffer from lower open rates and click-through rates, and ultimately, fewer conversions.

So how do busy creators manage to maintain a mailing list on top of content writing, business strategy, and a million other priorities?

With cloning still out of reach, the savvy creator uses a killer combo: email list management services and list management strategies.

It may sound underwhelming, but the email list management services and techniques in this post can handle technical details like list cleaning, segmentation, automation, analytics, and more, allowing you to focus on building relationships with your customers and growing your brand.

Without further ado, let’s walk through some tips on how you can ace your mailing list management strategy, the best software to use, and much more.

What Is Mailing List Management?

Email list management refers to all the steps and processes required for maintaining and growing a subscriber base. Broadly speaking, list management means collecting data on subscribers and their behavior to better understand their wants and needs, avoid churn, improve deliverability, and grow.

Mailing List Management (Tips & Tricks)

While there are many people out there who have an email list, only a few are putting an effort into maintaining it–let alone maintaining it effectively! Here are nine tips to help you level up your email list management game:

Choose A Reliable Email Service Provider

A good email service provider (ESP) will offer robust list management tools, deliverability monitoring, and other features to help you manage your mailing list more effectively. beehiiv provides you with these features and more!

Keep Your List Up-To-Date

Regularly clean your mailing list by removing inactive subscribers, bounced email addresses, and unsubscribed contacts. This will improve your open and click-through rates and prevent your emails from being marked as spam.

Segment Your List

Divide your mailing list into segments based on interests, demographics, behavior, or other criteria. Create targeted campaigns that resonate with specific groups from your subscriber base.

Personalize Your Emails

Use dynamic content and personalization tags to tailor your emails to individual subscribers. This can increase engagement and improve your open and click-through rates. You can do it in the smallest of ways–like adding their name to your welcome email or thank you emails! As a bonus, our last tip–segmentation–goes a long way toward enabling you to personalize emails.

Test And Optimize

Test different email elements with A/B testing, such as subject lines, content, and calls to action, to see what resonates best with your subscribers. Then, use this data and analytics to optimize your campaigns and improve your results.

Provide Value

Ensure that your emails provide value to your subscribers. Offer exclusive promotions, valuable content, or other incentives to encourage people to stay subscribed. While you do ultimately need to make sales, a good rule is to keep about 80% of your emails value-focused. There are a lot of emails in their inbox. Give them reasons to choose your content every day.

Keep Your Emails Consistent

Ensure that your emails maintain a consistent tone, design, and branding. This will help your subscribers recognize your emails, improve engagement, and build your brand voice and image.

It’s also important to be consistent in when, and how often, you send your emails. If you tell readers to expect your newsletter every Wednesday, and it doesn’t come, it damages both your professional image and their trust.

Monitor Deliverability

Check your email deliverability regularly to ensure that your emails are reaching your subscribers' inboxes. A good ESP will provide tools to monitor deliverability and troubleshoot any issues that you face.

Monitor Your Metrics

Metrics like open rates, clickthrough rates, conversation rates, and bounce rates are essential for assessing your content quality and campaign performance. Learn to leverage these based on your needs and improve your campaigns to get better results.

Management Mailing List (Key Considerations)

There are several important considerations to keep in mind when managing a mailing list. Here are a few of the most important.

Data Privacy Regulations

For good reason, most customers are skeptical about sharing their data online. Data protection policies like GDPR and CCPA exist to help protect consumers. Make sure that your mailing list management practices comply with these protections to keep your subscribers’ data safe.

The best way to do this is by informing your subscribers about your privacy policy and the data you collect and use. This helps them make informed decisions and helps build trust in your company.

Quality Over Quantity

Your list may be a mile long, but if it’s full of unengaged subscribers, it may as well be kindling. Instead of scrambling to grow your numbers, focus on attracting subscribers who are genuinely interested in your brand and content. This will improve engagement and minimize spam complaints, which will in turn improve deliverability and conversions.

Automation

Use automation tools to streamline your mailing list management. Create targeted campaigns that automatically trigger based on specific subscriber behaviors or preferences. For example, if you want to greet your new subscribers for signing up, you can use automation to schedule a welcome email one hour after they fill out your sign-up form. Similarly, you can automate the process of upgrading their membership, or even set up manual triggers according to your preferences!

Mailing List Management Software (5 Key Features)

Email list management software makes managing an email list easier and more efficient. There are a few features to consider if you’re searching for the best platform–here are the top five I wouldn’t go without.

Segmentation

Look for software that makes it simple to segment your mailing list based on demographics, interests, behavior, or other criteria. This feature is available at beehiiv to help you build targeted campaigns that resonate with particular groups of subscribers.

A/B Testing

A/B testing enables you to compare different versions of subject lines, calls-to-action, and more. With this data, you can optimize your campaigns and increase conversion rates. Want to see an example? Michael Comeau from our Writer’s team did 1000+ A/B tests on beehiiv.

Mobile-Friendly Design

From the time we wake up to the time we go back to bed, our phones are by our side or in our hands. People check 90% of their emails on their phones, and as more people are viewing their emails on mobile devices, your emails must be mobile-friendly. beehiiv has responsive email templates that automatically adjust to fit any screen size, making it easy for you to create content and edit as you go.

Cost-Effective

Mailing list management software can be costly, so look for software that offers affordable pricing plans that fit your budget. Our pricing plans have no hidden fees, making them accessible to businesses of all sizes.

Integration

Integration with other tools and platforms, such as Stripe, Wix, Slack or Twitter, and Instagram, can improve the entirety of your marketing strategy and streamline your workflow. You can easily connect with other parts of your marketing stack through your beehiiv account.

Mailing List Management (Closing Thoughts)

By now, you know how crucial it is to manage a mailing list for effective email marketing campaigns. Following best practices, such as maintaining data privacy compliance, prioritizing quality over quantity, segmenting your mailing list, personalizing your emails, monitoring deliverability, tracking metrics, and utilizing automation tools, will help you effectively manage your mailing list and improve your email campaign success.

Choosing the correct mailing list management software can also make or break the success of your email marketing efforts. Choose a platform that stays on top of the latest marketing trends, and helps you do it, too.

beehiiv helps not only with managing your email list effectively and efficiently but also with improving conversion rates. Still not sure whether to take the leap? Listen to the people who chose us and loved it–see their feedback here.

Can’t wait for you to join!