How to Spot a Bad Email List and Turn It Into a Good One~ By Lindsay Kolowich

Email is still one of the best ways to reach your target audience, contrary to what you may have heard. In fact, customer acquisition via email has increased by 4X in the last four years.

But it’s not the best way to reach people who don’t want to hear from you. Bad lists won’t just stall your marketing efforts, they’ll actually undermine your business. If you don’t regularly clean your email lists to ensure everyone you email has a valid email address and actually wants to receive your stuff, here’s what you can expect to happen: 

         

1. People will ignore, delete, or mark your emails as spam.
2. Your deliverability and sender score reputation will decline.
3. Your open and click-through rates will drop.
4. Your unsubscribe rate will rise.
5. You might get in trouble with the law.
6. Your boss won’t be happy to see your email marketing metrics start to tank.

Since you probably don’t want any of those things to happen, we’re here to give you info on turning your bad email lists around. In this post, I’ll go over what bad and good email lists looks like, and what steps you can take to transform your bad ones into good ones. By the end, you’ll be in much better email marketing shape.

What a Bad Email List Looks Like

It was bought, rented, or borrowed.

With aggressive goals on the horizon, it can be tempting to acquire email lists the quick and dirty way. But sending emails to people who don’t have a prior relationship with your business will severely hurt your reputation with your prospects, your internet service provider, and your email server.

First of all, any email list that’s for sale or rent is guaranteed to be low quality. Nobody with a good email list would give it up to somebody else because its value would decline as more and more irrelevant content is sent to it.

Secondly, people really don’t like being spammed. Recipients of your emails weren’t expecting to get an email from you -- and they likely didn’t want to get an email from you. Many of them will mark your message as spam, which hurts the Sender Score of the servers you send from. This taints your IP reputation and makes it harder for your future emails to get delivered. Many email service providers will cut off senders that violate certain limits because of the impact on IP reputation and delivery. You’ll also put your company in jeopardy because you’re all on the same IP address, and those can take months to recover.

Plus, you’ll be known as a spammy marketer -- and you’re better than that!

There are other options people can take besides hitting “spam” -- and they can hurt almost as much.  According to the 2014 Science of Email report, The most common responses to unwanted email are, in order: 1) ignore or delete, 2) unsubscribe, and 3) mark as spam. This isn’t good news: ignoring or deleting emails are also terrible for your reputation and can cause you to get caught in spam filters more often and will reduce your conversion rates.

It has steroidal growth.

The size of your list doesn't account for the quality of email addresses on it. Steroidal growth of email lists either means your team is buying or renting email lists, or there are bots filling out your forms. List quality suffers significantly either way.

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Lindsay Kolowich

Lindsay is an inbound marketing blogger at HubSpot. She's into business, marketing, the beach, and the Boston Red Sox.

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Internet Marketing Through Newsletters

Internet Marketing Through Newsletters By Anthony McBride
If you have an internet business, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about how to get more visitors. After all, attracting people to your little corner of the web can be difficult. One creative way of achieving this is by using newsletters. Internet marketing through newsletters is a smart way to get people interested in what you do.
Using newsletters is different than traditional marketing, where you just try to ‘get the word out.’ Website promotion through newsletters is a soft marketing technique that simply informs people. This instills trust and credibility and will send people right back to your website. Here are some guidelines and tips for creating an effective newsletter marketing campaign for your online business.
1. Ask for address, don’t buy them
You can go and buy long lists of email addresses and use them to distribute your newsletter. It is easy, fast and requires little work on your part. This might seem like a great way to start, and it does have some merits, but in general, it’s best to ask people for their email address.
People are tired of getting unsolicited spam mail and that makes them skeptical. This starts your relationship off on the wrong foot. So, ask visitors to sign up for your newsletters. Network with complementary websites for referrals and of course, ask people that get your newsletter to pass it along!
2. Make it fun and interesting, no matter the topic
Think you can’t have a fun newsletter because you sell concrete or industrial strength solvents? Think again, because no matter what your business is, you can and should have a fun newsletter that people look forward to reading. The goal is to get people interested and have them pass your newsletter along to their friends. Making them think and laugh will achieve this goal.
There are many ways to make a newsletter standout and get noticed. Start with well written content and add peripheral subjects for variety. Add in quirky quotes, interesting first hand stories, funny tidbits, helpful hints and event puzzles and games. You want people to feel that your newsletter adds value to their life.
3. Be consistent
Consistency is important in business, and it’s just as important when it comes to your company’s newsletter. This means being consistent in all things, from frequency to quality. Remember that people will form an opinion about you based off of your presence online, and this includes your newsletter.
So, if your newsletter is set to be out every two weeks, make sure you hit that deadline. If it is monthly, never let a month go by without getting it out as scheduled. Additionally, make sure that it is consistent in contently well written with similar sections each time.
Internet marketing through newsletters can give you credibility and drive up sales when you do it right. This starts with asking for email addresses and ends with interesting content delivered in a consistent manner. Follow these simple rules and people will be anxiously awaiting your company’s newsletter each and every time!
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Is email marketing over?

Is email marketing over?
by Richard Fouts    July 30, 2012
A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Yes, if you use it as a generic outbound tool. No, if you use it as a partner to outbound marketing.

For example, a Survey by Pardot finds that nearly 70% of B2B marketers don’t think of email marketing as a primary lead generation tool. Why? The answer is fairly obvious, but I’ll review it anyway.

Email marketing, from your buyer’s perspective, is outbound spam. And – they will do anything to avoid it (TiVO, spam filters, caller ID, junk folders and the DELETE KEY are all evidence that buyers don’t want to hear from you). After all, the term junk mail didn’t come from nowhere. Marketers still send junk mail, they just do it electronically.

The Pardot survey shows a majority of B2B companies (65%) allocate less than 25% of their budgets to email marketing, while only 9% are devoting more than 50% of their budgets to email efforts. The survey also indicated that 70% of B2B marketers do not consider email marketing to be a primary lead generation tactic. Why not?

Marketers, hip to buyers that don’t want to hear directly from them, are moving more investment dollars to inbound marketing, then using email to move new leads through the sales process or to re-engage dormant leads.” So while email is alive and kicking, it’s just being used a different way.

For example, the survey also shows more than 60% of B2B marketers use email for drip nurturing. Of those, 65% personalize their messaging to align with how a prospect responds.

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