After you’ve organized a conference a few times, you might have a lengthy list of email addresses from those who have agreed to receive marketing communications for your event. It can be easy to forget about maintaining email lists, and sometimes the task can seem daunting. If it’s been a while since you took a look at that list, now is a great time to do so! Making sure your marketing email list is neat and clean is one of the most important factors in effectively leveraging digital communications about your event.
First, ensuring that the list of emails you have is current helps keep your communications relevant. If you use a marketing email service, you’re probably paying them based on how many emails you send. If you’re sending emails to people who signed up for your email list years ago, they might not even be opening your emails, much less engaging with them through link clicks, which can mean you’re wasting money. However, many marketing email services offer the ability to automatically stop sending emails to those who haven’t opened any after a set period of time. Check with your provider to find out whether they offer this feature.
You can further optimize your spend by eliminating spam email addresses as well as those that return your messages undelivered. If your messages bounce off an email address that doesn’t exist, has a typo in the spelling, or is attached to an inbox that’s at maximum capacity, the marketing communications you’ve paid to send aren’t even making it in front of your audience. Many email marketing services also offer a feature that automatically eliminates these addresses.
Spam email addresses usually don’t bounce back to you, but they’re wasted because there’s no real person attached them. If you collect your email addresses through a paid registration or ticket purchase, you likely won’t have as many as those with email subscription forms available for anyone to fill in an email address and subscribe. A few factors that can indicate a spam email address include a long string of nonsensical letters and numbers, an email that includes the phrase “no-reply,” as well as the phrase “anon” followed by a string of digits. You might be surprised by how much removing these email addresses from your database can boost open rates and save marketing dollars.
Finally, one of the most important reasons to maintain your marketing email database is convenience. Often, email marketing services perform audits of their customers’ databases, looking for anything that could indicate the customer is using their service to send spam or otherwise harmful content through the company’s servers. If you’re on a deadline to send out an email to your messy database, the service you use could choose to prevent you from sending your message until you’ve cleaned up your list.
It’s easy to neglect, but you won’t regret performing regular maintenance of your email database. While it’s not always the most enjoyable task, it’s a smart way to save time, money, and headaches. When you’re ready to send out an email inviting your attendees to your next event, inspire them with our flexible, purposefully-designed venue. Contact us today to schedule a tour of our campus or to learn more about our all-inclusive event planning packages.
