Clean Up Your Email Marketing Account Painlessly!

Most entrepreneurs and small business owners rarely think of cleaning up their email marketing system. I’m referring to both the program you use to send out your emails AND your email campaigns or promotions lists. Let’s go one further and include your subscriber list.

Well, maybe you have thought of it but you just haven’t actually scheduled it as a Must Do task. The first time might be a chore, depending on how many signup lists you have, but if you do this a few times a year it will go quicker each time and you will really get to know what you have in stock and have a better understanding of your audience to boot!

Here is a list of the things I do in my cleanup process.

I use Aweber so if you use a different system things may be referred to a little differently but for the most part it should be the same.

• Check the mandatory signature that your system sends out at the bottom of all outgoing emails
• Delete old draft messages from the queue that you never sent.
• Do you use email templates?  Do they need a makeover?
• Has your logo changed? Make sure your new logo is updated on every list or place where it is used in your account, including email templates.

Check Each Campaign Individually

• Check all campaign lists to make sure that your contact info is up to date
• Go through every autoresponder message in every list, including the long email series. Make sure they provide information that is current, that all links are active. Even check any material that you link to. Is there info on your PDFs that needs updating? Is the content current and relevant today?
• Read ALL optin confirmation emails. Make sure they are not generic. This is a crucial step in your subscribers signup process. If this email doesn’t seem human generated or help them remember why they are being asked to confirm they are likely to delete it without clicking that confirmation link.

Purging Your Email List

I know, you probably cringe at the thought of your email list size being reduced. And to think of you actually removing them yourself! Oh la! But the fact is, a good purge of your list can truly be a good thing, I promise.

Your open rates and click rates will be more accurate because you are no longer including bounced email address, email addresses people use to signup for freebies but never read the emails they get, and people who just aren’t interested in your offers anymore.

Here’s some food for thought. In most email marketing systems you pay for the amount of contacts you have or the amount of emails you send out. Why would you want to pay for dead weight?

Anyway, if you are doing list building activities you’ll replace deleted contacts with new freshly engaged prospects.

These are the people I recommend removing:

• Remove unsubscribed people from your list(s)
• Review bouncing contacts and remove those that have been bouncing for a while
• Remove subscribers that no longer open your emails.
• If you have campaigns that are dead and you don’t intend to use them again, invite those subscribers to join one of your new campaigns and remove the ones that don’t respond, especially if they haven’t opened your emails in a long time. Then delete that old campaign!
• If you have lists that are duplicate of another, meaning when they sign up for one list, you have them automatically subscribed to another, then consider whether it’s necessary or not. In Aweber this contact counts twice or as many lists as they are subscribed to.

Keeping a clean work space is important to efficiency but more importantly this cleanup system will keep you from looking silly to those who do pay attention to you and want the information that you have to offer.

So, make time for this very important project and just get it done!

Put it on your schedule and block out enough time to give it your all, just like you would for a client or a marketing campaign.

You’ll be glad you did!