This article explains why you build a stronger house mailing list when you follow the best practices of list hygiene, relevancy, reader engagement and permission instead of grabbing every email address you come across.

If you really want to impress me, don’t brag about your mailing list with 5 million to 10 million records on it. Like with anything else, it’s not the size that matters; it’s what you can do with it that’s going to get my attention.

Any email-marketing super-genius can go out and buy a $99 CD stuffed full of obsolete, invalid or useless email addresses that skirt or outright violate the CAN-SPAM rule against illegal harvesting. Likewise, it also doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination or skill to set up a dodgy co-registration deal with a partner whose own track record on list acquisition and deliverability is so spotty nobody else wants to be associated with it.

Even if you collect all the addresses yourself, if you never clean out your list, you end up with the database equivalent of a house so stuffed with junk you have to clear a path to get from the kitchen to the bathroom.

List-building isn’t just about building the list. It’s about keeping it up to date with engaged, active subscribers.

Email marketing isn’t just about list-building, either. Once you build it up, you need to find ways to break it down into segments so you can send highly targeted, relevant campaigns with messages that collect higher opens, clicks and conversions.

Those are the campaigns that are going to push your marketing program to the next level and get you the returns you keep bragging about to your boss, and that’s what’s going to get me to buy you drinks at the next marketing conference so I can hang onto your every fascinating word.

But that’s a whole ‘nother story. What I want you to understand today is that if your email marketing program isn’t all that it could be, your mailing list is probably one of the reasons why.

If you came to email marketing from the direct-marketing world, you know that the older a record is, the less likely you’re going to get a lot of action from it. Your newer subscribers are usually more enthusiastic openers and clickers.

• You sent too many offers in too short a time. Or …
• You sent too many of the wrong offers. Or …
• You promised one thing and then delivered something else. Or …
• Their needs or interests or wants changed over time. Or…
• The subscriber abandoned an email address with an unlimited mailbox, so it continues to accept mail but no one reads it. Or …
• The address was never going to do anything for you in the first place because it was a “ This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ” or “ This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ” address you got by harvesting Web pages or buying a dirty mailing list.

Whatever the reason, research shows about 20% of your mailing list goes bad every year. If your list hygiene isn’t up to par, you’re throwing good money away and hurting deliverability. 

So, how do you develop a list that’s longer on longevity and shorter on churn? Get rid of these useless addresses that are clogging your list and then sharpen up subscriber engagement.

Trim the List

First, you have to figure out who the deadbeats are. On a consumer list (as opposed to B-to-B), attention can drop off measurably a month after opt-in.

(And yeah, permission is the expectation here. If you’re still using opt-out to build your list, you better switch now because I have no time for opt-out marketers.)

With some database massaging, you should be able to figure out when your own list interest begins to drop off. Segment your list into time periods out from opt-in, such as two weeks, a month, three months and six months, and compare opens, clicks and conversions.

If the numbers bear it out, create a sublist of all subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked on a message within three months of opting in. Send a cheery message inviting them to return and update preferences or enjoy a subscriber-only promotion.

Give it a week or so, and then follow up. Then, eliminate anyone who doesn’t respond. It might kill you to dump a valid address, but they’ve already left the building as far as you’re concerned, so they’re doing you no good.

Engage and Re-engage

New subscribers are usually the most enthusiastic. But you can revive the romance with your long-term readers at the same time with two strategies that really are two sides of the same engagement coin:

• Get ‘em while they’re hot: Send out an email confirmation message as soon as they hand over the email address. Check your list software settings to make sure this happens or ask your IT department to do it.
  
  Then, as soon as they confirm, send out a welcome message, which restates what they signed up for, what you will send, how often, and even how to unsubscribe if they changed their minds already. Sweeten the deal with a special-subscriber offer, or use it to lure them back to fill out a more detailed preference form.
  

• Revive the romance: Create a campaign to send to anyone in your lowest-performing list segments, however you define it, such as lack of response or low sales volume.
  
  Send an email message in which you remind subscribers what they signed up for and offer them the chance to tell you what the problem is. This could be the same as or similar to the one you send when you purge deadbeats. This time, your list software sends this message automatically when a subscriber crosses a performance threshold, such as no opens after 10 mailings.
  
  Again, include a promo and/or invite them to update their preferences to make the mailings more relevant, or direct them to your unsubscribe page and let them remove themselves. Then, honor the unsubscribe promptly.

Yes, you could end up losing one third to one half of your list. But those people aren’t really lost if you never really had them in the first place. They weren’t opening and they weren’t responding to your emails. So, why are you still spending time and money on them? In the world of email marketing, you only have two choices: get them back or cut them off.

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