How have you improved your email marketing strategy in 2018?
If your email program is still stuck in 2017, a recent Marketo blog post gives marketers 5 email tips for 2018. From email personalization and segmentation to creating full-funnel campaigns, the post is jam-packed with strategies to incorporate into your email program.
There’s a common theme throughout these email strategies. Ultimately, they all come down to sending more relevant email. With a marketing automation platform in place, you have the potential to learn more about your audience and use your data to target them more effectively. It’s important to make the most of that potential.
No matter what new email marketing strategies you try, here are a few tips for using suppression lists to the most out of your email program, in this year or in the future.
1) Put your email suppression lists to work for you.
If you’re getting more strategic with your email program, there’s no reason you can’t get more strategic with your use of email suppression lists too.
Email marketers typically use suppression lists to store nonmailable email addresses, such as people who have opted out of your marketing communication. However, they aren’t just for keeping up with your unsubscribes. You can also use email suppression lists to exclude certain members of your mailable email list in order to target your email marketing audience more effectively.
With more strategic use of your email suppression lists, you can maximize the performance of your email campaigns. That way, you send more relevant email to the right subscribers while making sure you don’t fatigue the wrong subscribers with irrelevant content.
2) Use suppression lists in your lifecycle marketing strategy.
Your email marketing efforts don’t end after you get a new customer to convert. According to the Marketo blog:
“Full-funnel marketing is a newer digital marketing strategy that focuses on spending time and money on the most valuable, profitable returns. (And with 67% of the buyer’s journey done digitally, email marketing is a nice platform match.) …The funnel has evolved into a customer lifecycle that includes pre- and post-purchase phases.”
That’s why it’s important to keep current customers in mind when you send email, and email suppression lists can help.
For instance, you can use a list to suppress current customers from certain email campaigns. When you exclude current customers from emails offering them what they already receive, you reduce the amount of irrelevant email they receive. Not only does this keep them happy with the email you send, it can also prevent them from getting upset if the email advertises a better offer.
Suppression lists can also come in handy for performance email marketing strategy. By excluding current customers from your CPA email marketing efforts, you can improve your campaign performance and, therefore, your email marketing ROI. Sending smarter email is a win for everybody.
3) While you’re focused on email marketing strategy, don’t forget about email compliance.
Today’s marketers use increasingly complex tech stacks to implement their email marketing strategies, often sending email from multiple ESPs or marketing automation platforms. This can maximize marketing performance, but it can also introduce compliance issues.
Emailing an address that previously opted out of your communication can cost you thousands, even if you only do it once, and more platforms means more places where you can collect opt-outs. Email suppression lists keep your email program compliant by preventing you from sending email to your unsubscribers, but only if your suppression data is kept current and synced between platforms.
If you send email from multiple platforms, it’s important to have a way to sync this data safely. Email compliance solutions like UnsubCentral provide a secure way to centralize your opt-out data between platforms and keep your opt-outs up to date. Best of all, UnsubCentral integrates with Marketo and many other top ESPs to ensure seamless email compliance.
When you don’t have to worry about your email compliance, you have more time to polish your email marketing strategy. Leave email compliance issues behind in 2017; see how UnsubCentral integrates with Marketo for automated suppression list management.