Creating a Solid Email Welcome Program
When you get a new subscriber to your list, it’s recommended that you send a series of emails welcoming them to your list. These emails should clearly state your opt-in policy and let your new subscriber know what to expect in future emails. You should also let them know how often they can expect to hear from you, and how to opt out of change their email preferences if they want to. This simple welcome program forms a solid foundation in creating a good relationship with your subscribers.
Why Long-Inactive Email Addresses Are Still Important
Now let’s address a myth about long-inactive email addresses. You might think that these addresses are worthless in terms of email acquisition.
It’s true that you should be aware people do sign up to email lists with email addresses that they haven’t used in forever. Or they may make a typo in their email, and that address might happen to match a spam trap address. In addition to that, consider that the rate of email churn is 20% to 30% per year. This means that there’s a good chance an email address will be invalid just a year after the user signs up for it.
When you send emails to a lot of invalid addresses, there’s an increased chance that your messages will be blocked and filtered, and ultimately not reach inboxes. To prevent this, take some time to clean up your list before sending out your next round of emails. The time it takes to perform a bit of list hygiene is well worth it. Use an email address validation service such as FireDrum Marketing to prevent hard bounces from invalid emails.
In Review: Four Quick Tips
- Use double email field confirmation.
- Use an email address validation service to clean up invalid email addresses before emailing them for the first time.
- Send a welcome email or series of emails to reiterate to your subscribers what they should expect from you.
- Avoid offering incentives to sales associates for email signups. This leads to low quality entries.
Email list validation services use proprietary list validation technology that helps lower bounce rates by flagging bad email addresses. This includes
- Duplicates
- Typos
- Formatting problems
- Syntax errors
- Dead domains
- FCC-mandated wireless blocks
- The DMA’s “Do Not Email” records
Some also flag fake or malicious addresses–and also some spam trap and honeypot addresses–to keep support problems to a minimum and avoid blacklists.
How Not to Collect Email Addresses
As mentioned before, offering incentives isn’t a good idea since it results in low quality email addresses.
Here are some reasons why:
• Sales associates can misunderstand the email address when recording it.
• Customers might give fake email addresses to fulfill the offer.
• Customer might not remember their email address, or give an address they don’t use anymore.
• A customer or sales associate might include a typo.
• The customer doesn’t understand that they’re signing up for a promotional email list.
• A customer is usually surprised to receive any emails aside from their electronic receipt.
Adding new email addresses to a list is of course the golden ticket for marketers, but experts have said that there are risks to acquiring new signups. With each new signup, you risk being listed on Spamhaus since you could possibly be sending emails to a customer that never opens or clicks them. The new email address could be a spam trap, and continuously sending email to it without getting any engagement could lead to blacklisting.
