Clean Up Your Email Marketing List Before the Holidays

For many small businesses, the next three months bring more email than the rest of the year combined: a fall offer, a holiday promotion, a gift certificate reminder, a year-end note. Every one of those messages goes to the same list, and for most businesses that list has not been looked at properly since it was first imported.

A messy list does not just waste sends. It sends the wrong message to the wrong people, greets customers by the wrong name, and mails people who asked you to stop. An afternoon of cleanup in October means every holiday message goes to the right people, looking the way you meant it to.

Remove what bounces

Open your email platform's report on bounced addresses. A hard bounce means the address does not exist, usually a typo, a closed account or someone who left a company. Those can be removed or suppressed straight away; they will never receive anything. Soft bounces, like a full inbox, are usually temporary, but an address that has soft-bounced on every send for months is effectively dead too.

Sending to addresses that bounce also counts against you with the inbox providers, which is one of the reasons mail ends up in spam. Why your email lands in spam covers the rest of that side of things.

Merge the duplicates

Most lists are built from several places over several years: an old spreadsheet, a booking tool, a website form, a trade show sign-up sheet. The same customer often turns up two or three times, under slightly different names or email addresses. Duplicates mean the same person gets the same email twice, which looks careless, and they make your list look bigger than it is.

Sort by email address first, then by last name and phone number to catch the near-matches. When you merge two records, keep the most recent details and the fullest history.

Fix the fields your emails use

If your emails start with the customer's first name, check that the field is filled in and correct. A list imported from an old system often has names in capitals, full names in the first-name field, business names where a person should be, or nothing at all. "Hi JOHN SMITH" or "Hi ," undoes the personal touch you were trying to add. Either fix the field or set a sensible fallback, such as "Hi there."

Sort customers from leads

The single most useful thing you can do to a list is tag each contact by their relationship to you. At minimum:

• Customers: people who have paid you. They know you and should hear from you in a friendlier, more familiar voice.
• Leads: people who asked for a quote or information but never bought. They need a reason to come back, not a thank-you for their business.
• Everyone else: newsletter sign-ups, event contacts and people whose history you cannot reconstruct. Treat them carefully, and send to them last.

With those three groups, a holiday email can say the right thing to each one instead of the same thing to everyone. The cheapest leads this month are already in your CRM goes further into what to send each group.

A list is only as useful as what you know about the people on it.

Honor every opt-out

Anyone who has unsubscribed must stay unsubscribed. The risk is highest when lists are merged: an old export from before someone opted out gets imported again, and they are back on the list without anyone noticing. Check that your platform's unsubscribe and suppression list is intact and that it applies to every list you send from. Under CAN-SPAM, opt-outs must be honored, and re-mailing someone who asked to stop is also the quickest way to earn a spam complaint.

While you are there, look for anyone who was added without asking, such as every contact from a purchased list or everyone who ever emailed your office. Those people did not sign up, and the holiday season is the worst time to introduce yourself to them.

Decide who owns it after this

A cleanup fixes the list you have today. New contacts will keep arriving with the same problems unless someone owns the list: checking bounces after each send, tagging new contacts as they come in, and merging duplicates monthly. It is a small job when it is done regularly, and a big one when it is left for a year.

If you would like it handled, email marketing with Vizible comes with a Chief Marketing Officer who plans and runs a monthly email campaign with you, and every contact's engagement is tracked on their record. See what that would look like for your business in a free proposal. If you are new to email, Email Marketing 101 is a good place to start.