Best practices for managing your audience

Your subscriber list is one of the main assets of your business. Think of it as the relationship with your future customers: people who have shown interest in your product or promotion and want to know more about you: you know they have liked you, now it's time to seduce them in your day-to-day life.

This is why taking care of your list is essential. It must be cleaned, studied and made the most of. Here we show you the set of best practices you should apply to turn your list into the first step of a successful campaign.

1. First and foremost: do not buy lists from third parties

Absolutely forbidden. In addition to being in breach of data regulations, you will be adopting a very inefficient email marketing strategy, as your addresses will not be qualified, with all that this implies: lower deliverability rate, higher bounce rate and loss of reliability of your domain name. You will need to create your own contact book from scratch, adding value to your content.

2. Consent, always express and informed

Each of your addresses must have been obtained with the user's authorisation. Otherwise you will be exposed to complaints. Read more about consent.

3. Employ a single audience and take advantage of segments

Employ a single general audience and segment it for the specific needs of your campaign. It's a way to save space and keep all your contacts in one database.

4. Clean and update it often

Remove addresses that have been inactive for a long time or are defective ( poorly written). Conventionally, inactive addresses are those that have not interacted with your campaigns for three months.

Doing this frequently can help:

• increase the delivery rate(as you only keep active and valid addresses);
• reduce the bounce rate, which has such a negative impact on your reputation.

5. Use the double opt-in method

The double opt-in is an automatic subscription system through which the user fills out a subscription form, clicks on the corresponding CTA and receives a confirmation email. This type of registration has many advantages:

• It avoid false records
• Increased user engagement by lengthening the subscription process
• Improved database quality
• You improve your reputation

6. Run a user revalidation campaign

With the new application of the GDPR regulations, it is mandatory to have the user's authorisation to send you campaigns and promotions.

However, it is important to know that this consent also has retroactive effects: you need to know whether your existing contacts revalidate their consent. This will save you trouble, should a former subscriber decide to report you under the new law.

This procedure will also purge your list, leaving only those addresses of users who are still interested in hearing from us after some time has passed. In other words, addresses of great value and potential benefit.

7. Watch out for lead magnets

A very common technique among marketers: offering a free gift in exchange for the users subscribing to your newsletter and completing their details. Perfect strategy, isn't it?

Not always. In some cases, users subscribe to get your lead magnet and once they have received it, they unsubscribe.

It is best if your magnets are related to your brand and have a customer loyalty function. For example, if you are a restaurant chain, it is better to offer a free tasting, which will make the user want to know more about your business, than to give away a free soccer ball.