Email list management: 9 best practices to do it right

To capitalize on these advantages, you need to do three main things: keep your list clean, collect data about your subscribers, and organize your list with segments, groups, and custom fields. 

This guide breaks down what email list management actually involves and shares 9 best practices that you can implement this week to improve deliverability, engagement, and ROI.

Email list management is the ongoing process of keeping your subscriber list healthy, accurate, and well-organized. 

It covers everything from how new subscribers join your list to how you handle unengaged contacts over time. When you do email list management well, your messages reach people who actually want them, protecting your email deliverability and making every send count.

The effort you put into managing your list pays off in the metrics that matter. Here are 3 of the biggest ways good email list management will help your email marketing.

1. Open rates will increase

When you stop sending to people who never open your emails, the percentage of your list that does open goes up. 

Improving your open rate and engagement will, in turn, improve your sender reputation. This makes it more likely that future campaigns reach your subscribers' inboxes rather than land in their spam folders.

2. You can send more targeted emails 

Managing your list with segments and groups allows you to send more relevant content and offers, which can have a big impact on your marketing. In fact, our e-commerce statistics report found that targeted emails get 36.69% higher open rates and 267.21% higher click-through rates than non-targeted campaigns. 

A well-managed list makes this kind of subscriber targeting possible because you have clean, accurate data to segment on.

3. Deliverability will improve

When your engagement increases and you send fewer emails to bots, full inboxes, and non-existent addresses, inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook take note, and your sender reputation improves.

This means messages sent from your domain are more likely to avoid spam and hit the main inbox.

MailerLite offers plenty of tools you can use for email list management. Understanding how they work will help with all the steps below. 

Segmentation

Segments are dynamic lists of subscribers defined by the rules you choose. Subscribers are automatically added to and removed from these lists when they meet, or no longer meet, the conditions. 

You can choose from any combination of the many subscriber filtering options offered by MailerLite.

For example: 

• You could have a segment for inactive subscribers that adds people who haven’t opened or clicked on your emails in 60 days. If someone in this segment clicks on an email, they will be removed automatically

• You could have a segment for people who make 3 or more purchases. They are automatically added when they make their third purchase

Once you’ve created these segments, you can send more targeted content while also getting insights into your customers and business. 

Find out more about email list segmentation in this article. 

Groups

Groups are static lists of subscribers. You can add people to these lists in many ways, but the 3 we see most at MailerLite are:

1. Add new sign-ups to a group depending on the form they use

2. Use automations to add people to groups when they take certain actions

3. Add people to groups manually via your dashboard

Once you add a subscriber to a group, they will stay in it until you either remove them from the group manually or set up an automation that removes people from a group based on certain triggers that they meet. 

Subscriber fields

These are fields, such as Name or Industry, in a subscriber's profile that you can update manually, via automations, via survey rules, or via actions in connected tools. 

Fields have many uses; use them to personalize emails with snippets, act as rules for segments, show or hide dynamic content, or simply track information about the people on your list.  

MailerCheck integration

MailerLite also has close integration with MailerCheck, an email list cleaning tool that analyzes your subscribers to find low-quality addresses. This can include addresses that no longer exist, those that belong to a role rather than a person, or those that come from a catch-all domain.

The integration lets you export and import email addresses to the tool directly. You can also access the tool from your MailerLite dashboard. 

Follow these 9 steps to better manage your email list. The best practices cover everything from keeping your list packed full of high-quality email addresses to collecting subscriber data and using it to create a well-organized list you can send targeted content to. 

1. Collect consent on sign-up

The first step to a well-managed list is ensuring the people on your list actually want to be there. By making it clear what people are signing up for, you’ll maximize engagement and keep unsubscribes and spam complaints low. 

There are many ways you can collect consent, including: 

• Making it clear what people are signing up for in the form copy

• Adding an opt-in checkbox to signup forms

• Adding an opt-in option during checkout

Collecting consent isn’t just about email list management. It will also help you adhere to privacy regulations like GDPR that require you to gain permission before contacting people.

Find out more about creating GDPR-friendly forms here. 

2. Filter out bots on signup

The fastest way to tank your engagement is to allow bots and invalid emails onto your email list. Fortunately, there are several ways to combat this issue. 

MailerLite automatically checks for bots with a built-in reCAPTCHA. This uses reCAPTCHA V3, which performs the checks in the background, so there’s no annoying “I’m not a robot” button for subscribers to click, thereby minimizing barriers to signup. 

The reCAPTCHA is set to on by default on all forms, but you can toggle it on and off by opening the form builder and heading to the form’s settings. 

Also consider turning on double opt-in for extra peace of mind. Double opt-in sends a confirmation email to the address entered in the form that people have to click on before they are added to your list. 

Double opt-in isn’t essential, but it’s the best way to ensure that you’re only sending to real addresses, as it’s much harder for bots to bypass the extra step of clicking on the email.  

3. Clean your email list 

Another way to ensure that your list is packed with high-quality subscribers is to validate that the emails on your list are real and can be delivered to. 

If you already have a large list that is showing signs of low engagement, or if you plan to send to a list that you haven’t contacted in months, use a tool like MailerCheck to analyze your subscribers and highlight issues like email addresses with typos, role-based addresses, or inboxes that are unable to receive mail. 

Or, if you use your own email signup forms, connect them to the MailerCheck API. This will validate the addresses in real-time, so people can’t sign up with low-quality email accounts. 

4. Collect data in forms

Once you know that everyone joining your list is real, it’s time to start collecting the data you need to manage it. 

The more data you have, the better you can group and segment your subscribers, enabling you to send more relevant content and track how different types of subscribers impact your business.

First, think about the forms themselves, as they often contain information that you can use without having to add extra fields. 

For example, at MailerLite, we have lead magnets targeting specific industries. We know that someone downloading a lead magnet on non-profit best practices is likely to be in the non-profit industry without needing to add an industry drop-down menu to the form. 

Of course, you can also add extra fields to the form to collect more information. Businesses commonly ask for details such as the person’s name, company name, company size, industry, or any other data that is relevant to managing a list. 

When people fill out this information, automatically add it to their customer profiles and use it to create segments. 

For example, the form below asks what sport the subscriber is interested in. Signups can choose from the drop-down menu, and the data is added to a custom field, which can be used to create interest-based segments.

The downside of adding more fields to a form is that it may put some people off signing up. So you’ll have to find a balance between collecting information and making it easy to sign up. 

5. Send a welcome survey

Another way to collect data you can use for subscriber management is with a welcome email survey. When someone joins your list, send an automated email that contains a survey with essential questions you can use for list management. 

You can then set up rules in the survey to manage the subscriber, such as updating fields in their profile or adding them to groups, based on their answers to the questions. 

6. Segment your subscribers

Segmenting your subscribers lets you group the people on your list around different data points and then send them targeted content.  

For example, data from your e-commerce store is automatically synced with MailerLite, so you’ll get information such as the number of purchases they make, what they purchase, and the value of total purchases.

This is automatically turned into the e-commerce segments:

• High spending repeat customers

• Repeat customers

• High spending customers

• Customers with no purchases

• First-time customers

• Customers accepting marketing emails

Since segments are updated automatically, your subscribers will be added in real time as they buy from your store. You can then send relevant emails and offers depending on their purchasing behavior.

Other ways to segment subscribers

You can also use email engagement to create segments. For example, create an automation that adds people to a group or updates their profile when they click on a specific link in an email. 

Some easy ways you can use this: 

• Filter people based on interests: If someone clicks on a guide to e-commerce email marketing, send them case studies from relevant clients

• Filter people based on buying intent: If someone clicks on a link to a pair of shoes, send an email containing similar products

Additionally, you can create segments for people based on how engaged they are with your list, where they open your emails, their signup date, signup source, when you last emailed them, and more. 

Finally, if you use our API or integrations to connect MailerLite to your app or website, you can send data from these external tools to MailerLite and then use this to manage your subscribers. You could track whether a subscriber is on your SaaS app’s free trial or their paid plan. 

7. Track unengaged subscribers

At this point, you know everyone on your list is a real subscriber, and you have your segments set up. The final step is to create processes that keep your list well-managed in the long term. 

One way to do this is to track email engagement so you can spot when people no longer open or click on your emails. You might count someone as unengaged when they haven’t opened or clicked on an email for 30, 60 or 90 days. 

Once a subscriber is unengaged, try to re-engage them. Set up a re-engagement automation that automatically sends an eye-catching offer built to get them to click or open. 

Send one or two emails, and then if the person still hasn’t engaged, you can either unsubscribe them or add them to a group for inactive subscribers that you filter from your regular sending. 

8. Remove bounced emails

Removing email addresses from your list that you can’t deliver emails to keeps your bounce rate to a minimum, which is essential for maintaining a high sender reputation. 

MailerLite automatically removes subscribers that bounce from your list. How we do this depends on the way that they bounce.

If the address hard bounces, which happens when an inbox doesn’t exist, we will remove it immediately. 

If a subscriber soft bounces, which happens due to a temporary error, such as a full inbox, we will keep them on your list. But if the same address soft bounces 3 times in a row, it will be treated as a hard bounce and removed.

9. Make unsubscribing easy

It sounds unintuitive, but making unsubscribing easy is an essential part of email list management, since people who don’t want your emails are far more likely to ignore your messages or, even worse, report you as spam. 

MailerLite automatically adds a link to your unsubscribe page in every email. Anyone who clicks on this will be unsubscribed.

You can also add a link to your email preference center. This is a page that allows your subscribers to opt in and out of specific types of emails. For example, if someone wants to get product updates but not marketing emails, they can use your preference center to tell you this.

Follow these steps for a well-managed list

Managing your email list well is one of the most important things you can do in email marketing, as it ensures you have a clean list that you can send more effective, targeted content to. 

Start by collecting consent and filtering out bots so every new contact is real and willing to hear from you. From there, layer in data collection and segmentation so you can send the right content to the right people. 

Finally, keep an eye on unengaged subscribers and make it easy for people to leave gracefully when they're no longer interested. Do this consistently, and your list stays clean, your data stays useful, and your sends keep landing where they're supposed to: the inbox.

Here are the answers to 4 more essential email list management questions. 

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in January 2020, and has now been updated with new insights about email list management.