Marketing List Best Practices

Efficiency, Effectiveness, Accuracy, Return on Investment. We’ve all heard terms like these in marketing discussions. How should these ideas guide marketing list management? Continue reading, to learn about recommended marketing list best practices.

Clean Out The Trash

A key component of a good marketing list is good data. For best results, deactivate contacts if they do not have a full name (first and last name), email address, and company name. Is a contact worth pursuing if you don’t have these basic pieces of information?  Probably not, unless it’s a new Contact you just met.

Business vs Personal Email Domain Names

Be cautious about adding marketing list members with “free” email domains such as Gmail, Yahoo, Comcast, Verizon etc.  These are either a “cheat” that allows the contact to sign up for something and not give their professional business details, or represent a small business that has not yet discovered the need for a vanity business domain. You can decide if these are appropriate contacts for your list, or not.

Inactive Contacts are Dead Ends

It should go without saying that marketers should only include active contacts in marketing lists.  Some campaign automation software does not automatically detect the record status, so you want to make sure to not waste resources and time sending your awesome content to invalid email addresses. Make sure to exclude inactive contacts!

Respect the Bulk Email Settings

Savvy marketers know that when a Contact unsubscribes from your content, you and your marketing software need to respect this request.  Be sure to exclude any contacts with a  “do not allow bulk email” flag on their record. Be sure to only include members in the marketing list who have NOT “opted out” , unsubscribed, or otherwise requested not to receive bulk email messages.

Focus on the Right Targets

Focus your marketing lists where possible, to not blast every possible contact. Choose the recipients who are roughly in the right demographic.  For example, don’t send webinar invites about a specific software application to company contacts who don’t use it, as this will lead to knee-jerk deletes, or worse, global unsubscribes. You want to catch attention and interest, not flood inboxes. Pick the right target recipients to achieve better quality responses.

Put In The Work to Keep Marketing Lists Clean

You might think, “oh okay, that’s great and extra work for me, so I’ll just keep blasting every contact we have until the end of time”.  Well, if your company sends masses of non-deliverable emails for example, you might be tagged as a spammer.  Also, you’re just wasting cycles for your marketing software, using resources that could be used by legitimate automation in your system, to send out useless emails that can never be delivered.

Our team at Beringer Technology Group has key knowledge and experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Marketing services. If you need assistance, give us a call.

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