River Ho explains how you can iron out the common kinks in list management, thereby optimising your email marketing.

Last week, we established the importance of list management when it comes to email marketing.

No client is equal. The same goes for your customer relationship effort. Some may simply use a single database to track all customer information, while others may use sophisticated CRM solutions that count every little interaction between your company and the customers. So, regardless of the size of your customer base and the complexity of segmentation, you may want to find out how you collect that information and the process in which you obtain the permission to send them emails.

The key thing is to get customer permission systematically. For online submissions, you should place an opt-in checkbox and attach a terms statement, followed by a record of the timestamp and IP address for every submission. Even more, I would also suggest sending out an email confirmation, so you're actually establishing a double opt-in process, which also helps confirm customer email addresses. This process will ensure accurate email records. 

For offline submissions, there are plenty of reasons that may lead to wrong email addresses, one typical reason is data entry typos. The double opt-in process thus becomes important, as you need to verify customer information, and react if it is wrong.

During the integration of legacy customer database, some companies tend to overlook one important step. They tend not to send out a double opt-in invitation to all their existing customers to get their consent on sending them promotional emails. Missing this step, companies may end up receiving negative responses from existing customers. Worse, it may cause the customers to hit the "spam" button and affect the score of their domain history.

However, the double opt-in process is a double-edge sword. If a customer ignores a confirmation note, the company may think that it is in fact losing a customer. But seen from another perspective, every customer's response to your confirmation note actually represents an affirmative vote to your company -- a confirmation which indicates: "Yes, I hope to learn more about your company!"

Technology limitations aside, I strongly recommend marketeres to deploy the double opt-in process.

Handling bounce backs
Many email marketing systems can define hard and soft bounces. A hard bounce means that the email has met a permanent error. When it's a soft bounce, on the other hand, the problem is likely to be temporary, such as when the addressee's mailbox is full. You may simply remove the email address from your list, or leave it there until it falls into the invalid email list. But both are not recommended. 

No matter which type of the error it is, you should act on it immediately. Ideally, if you have a secondary email option, you should immediately send out a reminder to the secondary email address. You may automate this process to make your work easier. Otherwise, you may need to connect them manually.

Remember: the more trial emails you send, the more negative score in your domain history. You need to act fast.

Recycle your disconnected customers vs. cost of acquisition
After rounds of trial, many customers may be disconnected in the process. Now, it's time to think whether you should reconnect with them through other higher cost channels like telesales, sms or direct mail. Or, should you just let it go? It's a challenging question; I can hardly answer this right away. One simple math is, if the cost of acquiring a new customer is higher than the cost of re-activating existing customers, then you should connect with them again. Sometimes, you should also take into consideration the time span of their last purchase, your product's life cycle, lifetime value and many other factors. No one knows your business better than yourself.

In summary, better list management from the beginning will make your life easier. And in future, before you blame an ISP for blocking your email, make sure to audit your email list first.

River Ho is director, technology, of Onexeno. Read full bio.