No One Cares About the Size of Your Email List

A large email audience is important, but marketers should never prioritize the size of their email list over the value of the engagement with customers or prospects. Matt Harris, Co-Founder and CEO, Sendwithus shares four ways to ensure your list focuses on quality over quantity 

When it comes to email lists, size matters. At least that’s what some marketers think.

Surveys show that list growthOpens a new window is a top priority for marketers, resulting in inboxes and social media feeds that are full of experts offering to help them grow their lists. They’ve also acquired a new appreciation for the value of email since studies indicate that email is a particularly good way to reach consumers on their smartphones.

Against this backdrop, the notion that you should cultivate a large email audience can make a lot of sense. And truth be told, there’s not a lot wrong with having a large email following.

It only becomes a problem when marketers get so hell-bent on creating a large list that they end up with people who don’t really want to be on that list and who may have been mislead into signing up.  Luckily, there are easy fixes for this. 

Imagine Two Marketers…

Marketer A has 100,000 email subscribers and Marketer B has 10,000. At first glance, Marketer A seems to have the edge — until you notice that Marketer B’s open rates are significantly higher. That means Marketer B’s message is more likely to be seen, and by people who are actually interested in it and who are more likely to engage. (According to Experian, the average open rate for commercial email is 25%Opens a new window , though open rates vary depending on the industry.)

Thanks to improved metrics, more marketers are focusing on the quality of their email interactions than in the past. There’s also been a trend toward personalizing email content, which can boost transaction rates by as much as 6x.

Quality Over Quantity

One thing experienced marketers never talk about is the size of their email lists. Instead, they focus on using email to facilitate quality interactions Opens a new window with their customers. That means creating a list made up of people who want to be on it and who are looking forward to hearing from you.

Here are four ways to ensure your list focuses on quality over quantity:

1. Run a health check. A large list might sound impressive but dig deeper and often many addresses are invalid or out of date. Email lists can shrink by up to 30% per year just from users changing their addresses. Regularly check the validity of your list and purge old, non-functional addresses.

2. Use double opt-ins. You’ll get fewer sign-ups by asking users to confirm that they want to be on your email list but those who do opt in will be fully invested. Being willing to take that extra step means they really want to be there. A double opt-in will also automatically disqualify addresses containing misspellings and typos, preventing the hard bounces that result.

3. Use above-board tactics to acquire subscribers. Events are a great conduit for email sign-ups. The same is true for gated content like white papers. Putting a form or an unobtrusive pop-up on your website are also legitimate options. But buying a list is not. Nor is promising a prize or reward for a subscribing. Be scrupulously honest about what you’re asking for and what the user can expect in return.

4. Regularly sunset and win-back your list. Most marketers are familiar with these concepts but to recap, you should regularly sunset users from your list if they haven’t engaged (opened, clicked) in a certain amount of time, typically three months. The fact that you’re sending to users who aren’t engaging can actually damage your deliverability with certain mailbox providersOpens a new window . As part of the sun setting process, you should send a win-back email, which is an email intended to regain the attention of the user. The exact strategy here can be customized quite a bit, but it can come near the end of your sunset period or after an additional delay.

The bad-old-days of spam gave email marketing a bad rap. Now that spam is less of an issue, marketers are once again appreciating the value of email — as are their customers. But marketers will only make the most of their email programs if they have high-quality lists.

That means looking at email less as a marketing channel and more as an opportunity to create and maintain customer relationships. That’s where email marketing — when done well — truly shines.