Email campaigns are a powerful and effective form of outbound marketing. But there’s one big catch — and it’s a doozy. Not all email marketing lists are created equal. While the right email list can create a significant number of new leads, higher sales and a healthier bottom line, the wrong list of emails can create a major disaster for a company.
One key to successful email marketing campaigns is knowing the difference between a good email marketing list and a bad one.
In our experience as email marketing professionals, we’ve identified the four most common mistakes that organizations make when it comes to buying email lists. We’re sharing our expert insight on how to make sure email marketing lists will work for you — and not against you.
Top 4 Email Marketing List Mistakes to Avoid
When companies purchase email lists from unknown sources, those lists are static.
What we mean by a static email marketing list is that the list will never be updated or refreshed. It is what it is from the moment you send your payment. It also means that the email list could have been created a long time ago, resulting in inaccurate contact information.. Because the email list is static, any mistakes within will never be fixed.
You, as the buyer, will deal with a high percentage of bounced emails, as well as lost opportunities. This is not what you’re looking for in your email marketing campaign [LINK to this post when live] investment!
A high email bounce rate can be a black mark on your reputation with your email service provider. But you’ll only know how high the bounce rate is if you have an email service provider or automated marketing system that tracks bounce rates for you.
At Acceler8now, we make sure our email marketing lists are completely clean and up to date. For starters, we upload fresh email addresses and company data every few weeks from reputable sources. This ensures our lists are always being refreshed with current, reliable data.
Also, our email marketing campaign system tracks your bounce rates, so you know exactly how many emails bounced and why. Common reasons for email bounces are spam filters, deliverability issues or bad data. Thanks to the quality of our data, your risk of having bad data is considerably lower than if you purchase your own email lists elsewhere.
The email address data you purchased has already been used by other companies.
When you purchase an email marketing list off the internet, you typically have no idea where the email addresses came from or who has used the email list already. It’s common when working with unscrupulous email list sellers for email databases to be resold repeatedly.
This means everyone you are trying to market to has already received email marketing messages from countless other sources. As a result, the chances are high that those recipients have email marketing fatigue, as well as a bad impression of marketing in general. This greatly reduces the chances the recipients will open your email, if they even get it before the spam filters do.
You don’t know the company or person you’re purchasing data from.
When you don’t know the source of your email marketing list, you have no way to determine the quality, or lack thereof, of the data it contains. You may end up with an email list with a variety of problems. For example, it may not actually contain email recipients who are part of your target market, even though you may have been told that it does.
At Acceler8now, we procure our email lists from several sources, not just one email list source. Plus, we do repeat business with the sources of our data. This helps us ensure we are getting quality email data targeted at recipients who meet our clients’ target audiences. As a result, we’ll be able to build an email database that contains the exact target audience you want to reach.
This is an advantage that our customers genuinely value because it ensures their lead generation investment has the potential to legitimately grow their businesses.
You don’t get lists with highly-targeted recipients.
Our commitment to high-quality sources for email marketing data also means we can pick and choose emails with demographic factors that appeal to our clients. This means we are building email marketing lists with email addresses that most strongly match our clients’ target audiences. As a result, we’ll be able to build an email database that contains the exact target audience you want to reach.
Our clients are investing in email marketing campaigns with the specific goal of reaching companies that have the potential to become their customers. To achieve that goal requires the highest quality email marketing lists possible.
Email marketing lists must be refreshed regularly, unique to each client, high-quality and highly targeted. These are exactly the email marketing list qualities we deliver to each of our clients.
What’s more, we will build your list with as many targeted audiences as you need without additional cost. And we allow you to add or change your email marketing list at no additional cost.
When you build your email marketing list on your own, it’s easy to get it wrong. When you work with Acceler8now, we’ll ensure that we do everything right. Our goal is to help you turn your email marketing campaigns into closed sales.