Mailing lists are a fundamental component of email marketing, therefore they must always be kept as clean as possible – meaning they must be free of duplicate addresses, incorrect addresses, and obsolete data.

Remove unwanted addresses from your email marketing lists, reorganize and advance your email marketing. Here’s how it’s done:

Look for the “Inactives”

Inactives are recipients that ignore your campaign: they don’t open your newsletters, don’t click any of the links and show no other form of interest. Once you’ve identified and separated these addresses you can take one of two actions:

• Targeted campaign: send a “wake up” campaign to try and pull them back into your customer pool. Use special offers, coupons and gifts – anything that is likely to catch their attention and remind them what you have to offer
• Removal: Removing inactive addresses creates a smaller, more targeted and efficient mailing list.

Look for your veterans

Your new subscribers are always the most active so try and give your veterans the push they need. Once identified, you can trigger a special “loyal customers” campaign. You don’t have to offer any discounts, your gratitude will get the job done.

Add new recipients

Don’t let removals shrink your mailing lists. Instead, use them as incentive to gather more recipients. Design new eye-catching sign up forms for your website. Spring is here and it’s a great time to make your website come to life with more colors and fresh designs.

Create a new campaign with discounts for new sign ups. Use social networks to spread your new campaign quickly and efficiently.

Time to take a closer look at your reports

Compare and learn from your past campaigns. Are your email open rates increasing? Are you learning from your mistakes or are you just marketing automatically?

Use ActiveTrail’s survey tool to get feedback directly from your customers – no more guessing what they think. After analyzing all that information, start working on a new and improved email marketing campaign.

Now that you know how to “clean up” your email marketing campaigns, checking yourself and improving your services should become a well perfected routine – at least twice a year!