Spring Clean Your Email Lists for Better Engagement

Email lists are one of the best ways to easily reach out to your biggest fans and to keep interest in your family entertainment center high. Email lists, while easily automated and simple to get setup, need some maintenance along the way to keep high engagement — and if your marketing client charges per subscriber, you may be paying for uninterested contacts. Here’s how to clean up your email list to achieve the best possible results.

The Benefits of an Email List

Email lists are excellent marketing tools for family entertainment centers, especially when you consider other traditional marketing efforts. Mailed printed mailers, for example, may go directly into your customer’s garbage can, but almost everyone checks their email on a daily basis.

By growing a list of subscribers who opt-in to your email list, you can conveniently automate and curate a list that receives regular emails highlighting specials, events, and tournaments. If you have weekly specials, send an email, and if you have an upcoming bowling tournament, you can spread awareness and recruit teams.

Why Clean Your Email List?

One of the biggest reasons you’d want to clean up your email list comes down to cost. While email list creation and upkeep is cheaper than many other forms of advertisement, many email marketing clients charge per subscriber. If you’re sending out hundreds of emails but aren’t seeing results you like, it may be time to cull your list and save some cash.

A healthy and engaged email list will also have higher open and click-through rates than one that has fallen a bit stagnant. Check to see if there have been any unsubscriptions (you may still be paying for them via your contact list) and also keep tabs on whether or not your subscribers are opening your emails. If they haven’t opened an email in months, the emails have bounced three to five times, or they’re no longer receiving anything at all, it’s okay to go ahead and cut your list down.

When to Spring Clean Your Email List

If the idea of cleaning up your email list sounds overwhelming, shoot for an audit of your list every six months or so. Tie it to the changing seasons, such as spring and fall, which can help you remember. It’s good to get into a routine so your contact list isn’t full of emails that are bouncing or failing — costing you money in the meantime.

Also, before doing a mass cleaning of your list, you might consider initializing a re-engagement campaign with a special incentive to boost interest, engagement, and open rates. Keep track of its performance for a week, and keep customers on your email list if they engage. Those that don’t can safely be removed.

In addition to dropping emails that return a hard bounce, it’s also a good idea to scan through your emails to check for typos or misspellings, particularly after the @ symbol. You may find that someone has input gamil.com instead of gmail.com, or added an extra “O” to yahoo.com. It wouldn’t hurt to tweak those possible typos and see if they go through next time.

While an email list cleanup may not be on top of your to-do list, you should try to weed out bouncing emails or uninterested recipients every six months or so. This will increase the overall health of your list and boost engagement, and while lots of subscribers may sound good, high engagement and interested recipients are far more important.

Ready to clean up your email list? Contact one of our experts today!