- February 4, 2016
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Your Guide to a Better Email List Strategy
What are the most significant barriers to the success of an email list strategy – and how are integrated marketers overcoming them?
That’s the question Ascend2 sought to answer in its most-recent research series, “Email List Strategy,” conducted among 245 marketing influencers in January. Researchers noted that “email has become the most prolific marketing channel. Consequently, a successful email list strategy is crucial to the overall performance of marketing.” Here are some of the other key insights.
Lack of an active list strategy is the chief obstacle to success. As one respondent commented, “The old adage – if we don’t know where we’re going, we won’t know when we get there – is why we need an effective email list strategy.”
Another top challenge, inadequate list hygiene practices also exasperates marketers. List hygiene is a data management practice that ensures your list is complete, verified and free of duplicates and undeliverable information, as we explored in “Do YOU Practice Good Hygiene?” and “5 Ways to Keep Email Marketing Lists Clean and Minty Fresh.”
A successful email list strategy is required to accomplish top email marketing goals.
“We’re under pressure to perform,” another marketer explained. “So when it comes to establishing email list goals worth achieving, quality trumps quantity.”
Increasing the quality of email list data is a top objective for 70 percent of companies surveyed. Nearly half (46 percent) of companies said email list quality is increasing, while quality is decreasing for only 16 percent.
And just how are these marketers inching closer to their goals? If your experiences line up with theirs, you may be finding yourself spending a lot of time developing email-specific landing pages.
More than half of study participants cited email-specific landing pages as their most-effective tactic for achieving list-strategy success. Further, they specified that offering content of interest to target audiences remains the best way capture email subscribers.
Ascend2 also found that companies consider email and social media integration as the most difficult task to execute. Similarly challenging is the execution of offline tactics (in-store/call center opt-ins) for online purposes (email lists) – something marketers discovered this past holiday season.
To stay up to date on the latest strategies, bookmark our continually updated library of email marketing practices.
