Six Tips to Maximize Email ROI

A clean list is the key to better email marketing performance. Sending emails to invalid addresses negatively affects your sender reputation causing ISPs to filter and block your email. The higher your reputation, the more of your email gets delivered to the inbox. 

Here are some actions you can take to ensure your email list is clean, you’re mailing the right subscribers with the right message, and you’re getting the most out of your email marketing investment:

1. Remove inactive subscribers (people who have neither opened nor clicked in the last year) from your list. This will help increase deliverability metrics including Inbox Placement Rate. 
2. Verify all new email addresses before sending your messages. Removing harmful and invalid email addresses pre-send results in improved email marketing performance.
3. Make sure you’re removing unsubscribes. This is obvious, and is also required by law. Maybe less obvious is the fact that one should actually make it easy to unsubscribe, as it’s a good method for reducing complaints. If you really want to re-engage a user, offer them mailing frequency options (in a preference center) and an exit survey to find out why they want to unsubscribe and offer them the option to opt-down instead of opt-out. 
4. Validate your existing data. For a variety of reasons, and often due to lack of time, resources, and/or accurate tracking data, organizations might have mailing lists that contain inactive or invalid emails.  For situations like these, there are services, like Experian Data Quality, that identify whether or not an email address is valid and deliverable. Experian Data Quality provides both full list processing and point-of-collection validation to ensure you’re  not mailing harmful email addresses. 
5. Segment your data and send relevant content to each segment. Bad content won’t prevent your email from being delivered, but if your content is boring or irrelevant, people won’t engage and they might mark your emails as spam and there goes your reputation! 
6. Choose the right email service provider (ESP) for your business.  This last point is crucial to the success of your email marketing operations. Make sure the ESP you choose provides you with all of the data required to optimize your campaigns and engage your user list in the best way possible.  You will definitely want metrics on all key email delivery, KPIs, from soft and hard bounces to successfully delivered.  High performance vendors can even tell you exactly how you’re performing on each ISP domain and provide a variety of ways to optimize your campaigns. Ongage is an example of such a platform which provides all of the above as well as a highly unique, innovative, and cost effective way to optimize your email marketing deliverability by using multiple ESPs.