Ten Steps To A Responsive Email List
How ‘clean‘ is your email list? Do you get a lot of unsubscribes? If you do then good job! A clean and responsive list is the only list worth having – no matter how big it is. You would much rather have a thousand subscribers that read what you send than fifty thousand emails that are never noticed.
An unresponsive list will lower both your open and click rates and even get you into spam reporting troubles. When you are paying a list management company more for a large list and very few even bother opening the email you have essentially failed at list building. You are throwing money away and wasting valuable time.
Inexperienced email marketers may feel the urge to let such a problem slide because the numbers look good but quickly learn a valuable lesson. A clean and active list is the only list worth having. Many marketers boasting their huge list sizes are the ones that didn’t learn. Hint: If a newsletter or ezine’s primary source of income comes from selling email ads be very cautious. If they are selling solo ads then run away as quickly as possible. Oh yeah, that’s going to upset a lot of people – lol. Angry solo-ad selling email marketers feel free to state your case below if you dare. (I’m referring to email lists here, not safelists and such).
- First, don’t be afraid of unsubscribes and make this step easy and safe for your subscribers. The last thing you want are for subscribers to unsubscribe by hitting the ’spam’ button or changing their email to a ‘trash’ email.
“Unsubscribe Please – It’s Truly Safe“
- Don’t be in such a hurry - Take your time and built it right. Build a strong and legitimate list. Never ever buy a list.
- Free bribes - One effective method of building a list is by offering something free to subscribers. This can be a good practice but it shouldn’t be your only or even primary list building tactic, especially if you plan on selling anything using your list.
- Be honest - We see a lot of ‘tricks’ to build a list but we want to be careful. Tricking people to subscribe to your list is non-productive and will hurt your reputation and overall objective. Have you ever signed up for an email course just to learn you are now on every list that marketer has? Have you ever made an online purchase and somehow magically become a newsletter subscriber?
If you want to offer a free ebook, for example, to build your list then just be honest. Let subscribers know they will receive your newsletter or future offers. Better yet, give them a choice from the start. We do run such list building campaigns at the Extreme Ezine but we always include a statement such as this:
* By submitting this form you will be subscribed to the Extreme Ezine. You will receive our newsletter and emails from ExtremeEzine.com including important updates, tips and occasional special offers. Your email address and other information is confidential and will never be shared or sold. You can SAFELY unsubscribe at anytime.
- Good content - Here’s something that we see being abused by many mega-marketers or email marketing gurus. Everything you get from them is a offer of theirs or one of their partners or affiliates. Nothing of substance. They are far too busy working on the next big send to worry about offering any real content with substance. That’s fine if that’s what your list is about but if it’s a newsletter your subscribers are expecting more.
- Sample - One way to help new subscribers make an informed decision is by showing past issues. Making archives available for potential subscribers is a sure fire way to build a relevant and responsive list.
- Respect - Show respect to your subscribers. Don’t assume they are interested in every offer you have or that comes to your inbox. Limit your mailing to once a day, once a week, several times a week – whatever you have established. Don’t send three a day because you ran across some article you like. Save that for your friends and treat your subscribers with a little respect. Your subscribers have other interests and tasks other than your continuos emails.
- Assurance - Assure your subscribers by including a simple statement at your opt-in form like:
“Your email is safe with us. We respect your privacy and do not share your information with anyone – even if you unsubscribe!”
- Relevancy - Are your E-mail marketing messages relevant to your list? If your newsletter in about woodworking then stick to woodworking related issues. Expanding too far beyond your main niche’s interests are going to hurt your list’s effectiveness.
- List Management - This is a big one and most of us figure this out after we have already invested time and money into the wrong solution. By the time we figure it out we find ourselves starting at the beginning again. There are many reasons to use a reputable list management and autoresponder service. You gain instant trust by many because they know the list management company is going to keep you honest.
Did you know many subscribers are afraid to unsubscribe? It’s true. Look what peewhy said on WebmasterWorld, “I’m convinced that the moment you click on the fatal ‘unsubscribe’ link, they simply sell your email address on to others“.
See: How to Know When Unsubscribing Isn’t Safe[over 950 diggs]
Important - Compliance – Last but certainly not least is staying in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act and all laws dealing with email marketing.
Related Posts:
- Top 10+ Email Marketing Tips
- The Battle For Email Deliverability
- List Size Doesn’t Matter
- New Study On The Unsubscribe Experience
- 16 Easy As Pie Ways To Grow Your List



Ezine Advertising Blog - Adrian Jock on February 28th, 2009
Good post, Brian. I fully agree with you except for one thing: free bribes is indeed a very popular list building method, but I don’t think that it’s a method for keeping your list clean. As a matter of fact free bribes is a method of adding also a lot of throw away email addresses (instead of potential readers).
And finally, here is a kamikaze method I started to practice two months ago on one of my ezines: I let subscribers know that I remove them if they are not active and … I’m not kidding, I really track everything and remove subscribers fom time to time
Ezine Advertising Blog – Adrian Jocks last blog post..How to identify top quality ezines for your ezine advertising needs? (Part 1)