Email Campaign Software: How to Manage Your Email Lists
Email Campaign Software: How to Manage Your Email Lists
Email campaign software is all about ensuring maximum utilization of the mailing list that is stored in the database part of the software architecture. Mailing lists are the bread and butter of any bulk email marketing venture and, to this effect, there is a lot of maintenance that must be done for it. This is not from the perspective of database maintenance as a software component but maintenance from a customer database perspective. Customers and mailing lists are extremely dynamic and the size of your mailing list can change on a nearly daily basis. There is another important factor to bear in mind and that is the security of your database as well. Spammers are always on the lookout for weak networks to exploit and steal addresses from.
The first step to managing your lists is to ensure that all of the people on your list have been legally added there. This means that you should have gotten an opt-in permission from each and every person on that list before mailing them. This may sound like an arduous task but it is a legal and logical requirement. A logical requirement because if your email campaign software sends out email to recipients that have not opted-in for the service, then those users will mark your emails as spam and this will start to accumulate spam complaints. Once these complaints reach a certain level, you will be blacklisted by an ISP and this can have disastrous consequences for your business. Don’t be surprised if your ISP even takes down your website for being connected to spamming practices.
Some addresses on a mailing list might not be active. This is because after signing up for receiving mails and updates, these users might have just lost interest in the product. If this is the case, you will notice that many of the customers on the mailing list are idle and non-convertible. Give these customers some time but at the end of the year, you should send a mail stating that the subscription to the email service is going to expire unless expressly renewed. By using this method you can weed out the prospects that were not active and non-convertible.
Security of your database is of prime importance on the internet in general but with a special twist when it comes to email addresses. Spammers are always on the look for weak security in the email campaign software of legitimate businesses and these people will try and hack your database or they will deploy worms that will transfer that database back to them. To avoid this, ensure that you have the best and most up to date software on hand to prevent malware attacks on your database server. It also pays to be offline most of the time until necessary.
Finally, you must continuously add addresses to your database to ensure that the opt-outs are matched by opt ins and that your business is never starved of people to mail to.
Jamie Colbs is a html email newsletter templates best practices activist advocate for Benchmark Email , a leading Web and permission-based email marketing service.
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