List maintenance doesn’t have to be as dreadful as it sounds… It can actually bring you a lot more than just an organized list – it can increase your deliverability, boost your open rates, improve face with your clients, and remove the bots, or unwanted contacts cluttering your list.
With PlusThis, the combination of a few tools can take your list maintenance a stress of the past, and generate positive outcomes in more ways than one.
When you think of cleaning your list, you may just focus on the removal of those unwanted bots, or old, unengaged contacts that are no longer worth your efforts. But how do you determine those contacts from the deliverable, marketable ones?
You’ll likely want to start by figuring out if the information you have for each contact is accurate, and actually deliverable. But then, you’d want to determine who of these deliverable contacts is actually engaging with you and opening your emails – and give them a chance to specify their preferences when it comes to what content they receive from you.
From there, you’d have a clear determination of what contacts are worth having; the contacts that want to be on your list, as much as you want them there.
Let’s go through the tools you’ll need and what each one will accomplish.
The Tools You'll Need
Email Validator
Email Engagement Triggers
Email Subscription Manager
Contact Nuker
Make sure the email addresses you have are valid and deliverable
Step 1:
It only makes sense to begin the process by ensuring that the information you have for your contacts is actually right. A simple typo could be keeping your emails from being delivered, which is ultimately hurting your deliverability, your engagement rates, and more.
Now, Email Validator can find a lot more than just a typo – it has almost twenty different validation results that can be found. It’s up to you how many things you want to track or determine from the email addresses.
Let’s pretend that you want to track each result for this – we’ll start the tool configuration by determining the email field we want to validate.
Step 2:
Then – we get into the different tags that will be applied based on the validation result.
Step 3:
The next set of tags is based on the level of risk associated with the email address.
Step 4:
The last of the validation results are advanced, and optional, but include the portion for typos found in the email address – then allows you to choose where to save the recommended correct one.
Step 5:
The last step is determining if you’d like a tag to be applied once the validation has been run. For this, we’ll apply a tag stating that validation was run and the date it was run.
Step 6:
Once we’ve established all the appropriate tags we’d like to be applied, we’ll save the tool and receive our tool URL for implementation.
When we have this url, we can go directly into a campaign that’s set up to run validation on either our entire list, or a certain portion of our list.
We’ll go into the sequence dedicated to running Email Validator, and choose the HTTP Post (Keap) process to paste the url into.
Segment your list based on who's engaging with your emails
Now that you’ve figured out what email addresses are valid and actually deliverable, it makes sense to run a check on if those contacts are engaging with the content that you share.
Email Engagement Triggers was designed to run on a schedule, or manually to determine different segments based on email engagement.
There’s 4 different segments that the tool separates your list into; Engaged within 30 days, Engaged within last 31-60 days, Engaged within last 61-90 days, and Engaged over 90 days ago.
By segmenting your list, you’re not only able to determine who’s engaging with you, but you can actually figure out who is NOT engaging with you.
Step 1:
Similar to Email Validator, we’ll begin configuration by choosing the email field we want to run the engagement trigger on.
Step 2:
Now we’ll select the tags to be applied to the applicable segment.
Step 3:
There are a few additional steps that are optional, including advanced tags to be applied and the ability to schedule the tool to run on a regular basis rather than manually adding the tool URL to a campaign.
You can choose the specific contacts to schedule the tool to run on, such as the contacts that received the deliverable validation result tag.
If you choose to schedule the tool, it is not necessary to implement the tool into a campaign to be triggered to run – since it will be running on a weekly/monthly basis on either the entire database or contacts with a specific tag.
Step 4:
If we’ve chosen not to schedule the tool, we will want to grab the tool URL that is created after we save the tool.
Once we have this copied, we’ll want to paste this into an HTTP Post (Keap) in our segmentation campaign.
Let your contacts manage what emails they receive from you
Now that we have our list validated, and segmented based on engagement, we have a better idea of who is worth connecting with. But we have one more thing to consider – what if these less engaged contacts were more inclined to engage if they were able to manage their preferences and receive only the emails they want to receive from you?
That’s where Email Subscription Manager comes in. This widget-creating tool allows your contacts to determine what segments of your emails they want to see in their inbox. This leaves them more inclined to open the email, click the links and will cause your engagement rates to increase tremendously.
Step 1:
Email Subscription Manager is a quick, simple way to create a widget that can be placed on any landing page that allows your contacts to determine which segments of emails they’d like to receive from you. Begin by choosing the different tags associated with each segment of emails.
Step 2:
Once we have the segments chosen, our preview will appear where we can see what the widget will look like.
This is what we’ll use to edit the wording, change the colors, personalize the widget a bit.
Step 3:
Once we’re content with the look of the widget, we’ll save our tool and receive the different implementation codes that can be used.
Depending on the landing page we have set up to direct our list to, we’ll grab the applicable code.
We’ll show Clickfunnels as an example. Once we’re in our landing page, we’ll grab a video embed code element to add our custom code.
Step 4:
Once we have our widget placed on the landing page, we can start directing our less engaged, but deliverable contacts to manage their email preferences.
From their choices, the appropriate tags will be applied to their record and can be used when sending each segment of emails.
Get rid of those unwanted, cluttering contacts
When we’ve reached this step, it’s time to look at the contacts that are cluttering your list. Whether it be undeliverable email addresses, old, unengaged contacts, or bots – it’s time to get rid of them.
With Contact Nuker, this places automation on the process of removing contacts in bulk from your list. It’s important to be conscious of the fact that the tool does permanently delete contacts, and this cannot be undone. However, when you are confident in the contacts to be removed, this tool can save you a lot of time.
Step 1:
Configuration of this tool is simple. It simply asks that you confirm your understanding of the severity, and permanency of using Contact Nuker.
Once the boxes are checked, save the tool and receive the Tool URL we’ll place inside of our campaign.
Step 2:
Inside of our campaign, we have a sequence dedicated to running Contact Nuker on the certain contacts we’ll push through.
In the sequence, there’s an HTTP Post (Keap) process where the Tool URL from PlusThis will be pasted.
The combination of these four tools is powerful, and creates a lot more than just a clean list.
Along with organization, the use of these tools will cause your emails to actually be delivered to the people that want to be engaging with you.
Email Validator will bring you a list full of valid, deliverable contacts, and a clear understanding of where your list stands regarding accurate information.
Email Engagement Triggers allows you to segment your list based on engagement, and establish who hasn’t been engaging with you as of late.
Email Subscription Manager gives you the opportunity to reach out to those contacts that have been less engaged, and allow them to choose what emails they’d prefer to receive from you. If people are receiving the information they are looking for, they’re are far more inclined to open and engage with your emails – leaving you with increased engagement rates.
Lastly, Contact Nuker enables the automation of bulk removal of those contacts that didn’t make the cut in your list. These contacts may be bots, undeliverable addresses and or old, unresponsive contacts that are cluttering your list from being as optimal as it could be.
By plugging these tools together, maintaining your list doesn’t have to be stressful. It can be an opportunity to check in with your contacts, ensure that you are addressing them in the best manner, too.
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