Do List Hygiene Myths Hobble Your E-mail Results?

A "clean" e-mail list is key to deliverability and marketing success, but some list hygiene assumptions can actually undercut effective list use. A recent Direct Marketing News article turned to industry experts to identify four common e-mail list hygiene "myths" to avoid. For example, if you think e-mail list hygiene is a simple matter of regularly scrubbing "bad" data (opt-outs, bounces and invalid addresses), you aren't going far enough to create a responsive e-mail list. Today, list hygiene also means identifying addresses that lack recent activity/engagement (opens and clicks), experts advised. And if your hygiene focus is simply to reach the inbox, you are myopic as well, assuming that a knock on the door is all it takes to win an open. Good list management goes beyond deliverability and "batch and blast" to effective list use via targeted, personalized, relevant messaging, industry leaders asserted in the article. Plus, if you believe your list hygiene has rooted out all the bots and spam traps, you may be living in a fool's paradise, especially if you are a product or retail marketer. Loren McDonald, VP of industry relations at Silverpop, flatly told DM News, “Bot use has become more of a problem.” Despite the growing volume and sophistication of e-mail boobytraps, he noted that there are also more services that can help with real-time verification to seek known bots and spam traps -- provided list hygiene programs realize the need. For the complete article, see http://www.dmnews.com/busting-myths-on-email-list-hygiene/article/356087/

How Does Your E-mail Response Measure Up?

Do you know if your e-mail response measures up competitively in terms of open rates and click-through rates? A recent blog post by Christopher Ratcliff, an econsultancy.com writer, helpfully put together benchmark measures by industry (and country) from third-party e-mail service providers MailChimp, Silverpop and UK-focused Sign-up.to. Just to give you a taste, Silverpop's 2014 benchmark study finds that the average U.S. unique open rate is 20.1% and the average U.S. click-through rate is 3.2%. But the differences between industries are significant. Just looking at Silverpop figures for example, health care scores the top average unique open rate of 26.2%, followed by education (25.7%) and nonprofits (25.3%). By comparison, travel and leisure e-mailers are at the bottom for unique opens with a low 15% average, along with media and publishing (16.6%). When it comes to click-through rates, Silverpop's top average goes to health care again with 4.8%, followed closely by consumer services (4.7%) and education (4.5%). Meanwhile, the travel and leisure industry also ranks lowest for average click rate with 2.2%. To check on e-mail response benchmarks for your industry, B2B or B2C, go to https://econsultancy.com/blog/65034-what-is-a-decent-email-marketing-response-rate#i.dm8nfzdnneipzz