Thursday, December 11, 2008
Maintaining Your Email Database
Regular maintenance is required to get the most out of your email database. Databases need nutrients, grooming and a little loving attention.
For example, say you run a weight loss website and send out regular email newsletters to people who are interested in losing weight. New people can join through a signup web form on your site. When they signup you have an opportunity to collect information from them that can help you to serve them better. Ask what their weight loss goal is and how many pounds a week they are trying to lose.
You can use an auto responder that is setup to send out a sequence of emails at a specified period after they signup. The email after they receive immediately after they fill out the signup form is usually a thank you for joining type of email with information about your service. Then the next day you have the scheduled auto responder send them an inspirational email that will help remind them to come back to your website and take advantage of the services that you offer. And then every week after the signup date a personalized message can automatically be sent to them to see how they are doing achieving their goals and entice them to visit your website.
Your weekly email newsletter will typically go out to your entire database. This is where you need to groom your database. When you send email and the message can not be delivered it is considered a bounce. To maintain a good relationship with the different ISPs and keep the quality of your list high the bounces need to be removed. It doesn't do any good to try over and over to send to an invalid or suspended email address. Of course anyone receiving your email that does not want to receive it any longer must have a method of unsubscribing but that should be handled automatically by the service sending the email.
You need to also look at the behavior of the people receiving the email. Say one of your subscribers told you when they signed up that their goal was to lose 10 pounds at a half a pound a week. So if they have been successful they will have lost the 10 pounds in 20 weeks. So do you keep sending them weekly emails for a year or two until they get annoyed and forget that they signed up on your site in the first place and report the email as spam?
It would be better to find out how they are doing with their goals. You can have web form on your site where people enter how much they have lost each week and then you can display a graph of their weight loss to inspire them. Then you will know if you should send them a congratulatory email for achieving their weight loss goal and switch them over to the weight maintenance newsletter. If they have completely failed with the weight loss program and are not returning to your website after a lengthy period you should consider purging them or moving them to an less active mailing list as they are letting you know by their inaction that they are not interested any longer and it is a waste of your resources to continue to email to them.
For example, say you run a weight loss website and send out regular email newsletters to people who are interested in losing weight. New people can join through a signup web form on your site. When they signup you have an opportunity to collect information from them that can help you to serve them better. Ask what their weight loss goal is and how many pounds a week they are trying to lose.
You can use an auto responder that is setup to send out a sequence of emails at a specified period after they signup. The email after they receive immediately after they fill out the signup form is usually a thank you for joining type of email with information about your service. Then the next day you have the scheduled auto responder send them an inspirational email that will help remind them to come back to your website and take advantage of the services that you offer. And then every week after the signup date a personalized message can automatically be sent to them to see how they are doing achieving their goals and entice them to visit your website.
Your weekly email newsletter will typically go out to your entire database. This is where you need to groom your database. When you send email and the message can not be delivered it is considered a bounce. To maintain a good relationship with the different ISPs and keep the quality of your list high the bounces need to be removed. It doesn't do any good to try over and over to send to an invalid or suspended email address. Of course anyone receiving your email that does not want to receive it any longer must have a method of unsubscribing but that should be handled automatically by the service sending the email.
You need to also look at the behavior of the people receiving the email. Say one of your subscribers told you when they signed up that their goal was to lose 10 pounds at a half a pound a week. So if they have been successful they will have lost the 10 pounds in 20 weeks. So do you keep sending them weekly emails for a year or two until they get annoyed and forget that they signed up on your site in the first place and report the email as spam?
It would be better to find out how they are doing with their goals. You can have web form on your site where people enter how much they have lost each week and then you can display a graph of their weight loss to inspire them. Then you will know if you should send them a congratulatory email for achieving their weight loss goal and switch them over to the weight maintenance newsletter. If they have completely failed with the weight loss program and are not returning to your website after a lengthy period you should consider purging them or moving them to an less active mailing list as they are letting you know by their inaction that they are not interested any longer and it is a waste of your resources to continue to email to them.
Labels: auto responder, databases, web forms
Maintaining Your Email Database posted by Jean Christofferson @ 1:07 PM 
