If you want to capitalize on the huge ROI of email marketing, you’ll need one of the best email list management solutions out there.
Creating the perfect email template or writing the best content is important, but marketers also need the right tools to manage their contact list more efficiently.
A properly segmented list is an integral part of every email marketing strategy, allowing you to target the right people, personalize your message, and generate leads for your business
In this blog post, you’ll find the best contact management tools to build, grow, and manage your contact list, along with essential list management best practices to do it like a pro.
then, let’s dive right in!
1. moose
Price: Paid plans start at $9/month, 30-day free trial; no cc required (register here)
moosend is a leading email marketing platform that allows you to not only create and automate your next email campaign, but also optimize your email list management
With the platform’s sophisticated list segmentation features, you can create segments based on information collected in the form of custom fields (they work like tags) and behavioral data. this way you can filter your mailing lists and create personalized content for your email subscribers.
also, regarding email deliverability, moosend has a sender score of 98% for sending your messages to your recipients inbox and avoiding the mail folder not wanted. The variety of integrations with email verification tools will also contribute to your list hygiene efforts and give you valuable data to manage your contacts more efficiently.
Overall, the platform will help you manage your lists, deliver your messages, and personalize your audience’s experience. You can try moosend’s list management capabilities when you sign up for a free account.
2. hubspot
price: paid plans start at $50/month, free plan
hubspot is an all-in-one marketing suite with a professional crm system that allows you to connect with your audience and manage your contacts in a simple way. hubspot has now fully implemented the unique piesync technology in its hubspot, so customers can benefit from additional functionality and additional features.
The tool allows marketers to send targeted emails to subscribers at different stages of the lifecycle, or target them based on additional contact information collected. Plus, the email list management software provides two-way data synchronization between different applications, so you don’t have to worry about your contacts being up to date.
Managing and growing your list is easy with hubspot thanks to its crm tool. you can harness valuable data to create personalized messages that increase your open rates and conversions. The platform also has rich analytics and A/B testing capabilities that help marketers make informed decisions about their marketing campaigns.
Overall, hubspot is a great solution for businesses looking to cover their mailing list management needs with one comprehensive platform. however, it should be noted that the system has a substantial learning curve.
3. constant contact
Price: Paid plans start at $20/month, 60-day free trial
Constant contact is one of the easy email marketing tools you can get to create email newsletters. But what about email list management? well, the platform offers some useful targeting features to get you started. however, these features are more basic, making Constant Touch great for beginners.
more specifically, the email list manager allows you to take advantage of segmentation by searching via contact field values or user actions such as their opens and clicks. plus, constant contact allows you to add your contacts to specific lists or even export them and then target them with a relevant email campaign.
In general, Constant Contact offers some basic list management features to keep your list organized. While it’s great for small businesses with smaller lists, if you have a larger list, you’ll want to consider some of the better constant contact alternatives.
4. paper form
Price: Paid plans start at $24/month, 14-day free trial
paperform is a great contact list management tool that allows you to create landing pages and newsletter signup forms to grow your list. the tool has a variety of beautiful templates to capture the email addresses of your potential customers.
more specifically, you can customize your forms by adding images or videos to make them more attractive. if you are more tech savvy, the tool also allows you to edit the form in html and css.
With paperform, you can set logical rules to define when questions, pages or other elements will be presented to your visitors. furthermore, embedding forms, sharing them on social networks or by email and analyzing the results is very easy to do.
As one of the best online form building tools on the market, paperform offers several integrations with popular apps to make list building easy. while the tool will help you create beautiful forms, it still lacks some customization options.
5. zero bounce
price: paid plans start at $15/month, free plan
zerobounce is an email verification tool that ensures the deliverability of your email, especially when sending high volume emails. the tool will help you eliminate invalid email addresses, reduce your bounce rate, and maintain a great sender score.
When it comes to features, the checker tool is equipped with an inbox location tester to perform spam delivery tests for different email providers like gmail, outlook, etc. this way you will always know if your emails are caught in spam traps. and help you optimize your content.
In addition to spam trap and abuse detection features, the tool can also validate IP addresses and verify key recipient demographics. consequently, you will be able to fill in missing information, such as the location of your subscribers, for better email marketing campaigns.
Overall, zerobounce is a great tool that you can use in conjunction with your subscription system to reduce your bounce rate and keep your email list clean.
6. mailchimp
price: paid plans start at $17/month, limited free plan
mailchimp is another popular email marketing software famous for its types of email campaigns, a/b tests and rss campaigns. while the platform is generally easy to use, its email marketing automation features can be difficult to master.
When it comes to email list management, Mailchimp offers great targeting options that allow you to combine up to five different conditional relationships. In addition, the platform gives you access to insights to find specific audience subsets and send more personalized emails.
mailchimp segments use demographic and behavioral data to better target your list of subscribers. To help you out, the email service also has some predefined segments that you can use instantly.
The popularity of the tool makes it an excellent email list management solution. however, you should know that mailchimp lists are siled and therefore crowdsourcing is not possible, unlike other popular mailchimp alternatives.
7. active campaign
Price: Paid plans start at $15/month, 14-day free trial
activecampaign is another email management software to supercharge your digital marketing efforts and get familiar with list management. however, the powerful features and complexity can be a bit overwhelming for beginners.
When it comes to managing your lists, ActiveCampaign allows you to use tags to segment your audience and target them accordingly. In addition, the service allows you to automatically add tags every time your visitors perform an action on your website.
compared to mailchimp’s somewhat poor deliverability, activecampaign scores very well getting your emails into the inboxes of popular email providers like gmail, outlook, and yahoo.
Overall, ActiveCampaign will help you automate your list management efforts. however, you may need a little extra effort to get used to the advanced features, and you will need a paid plan to test its full potential as the trial is very short.
8. sending blue
price: paid plans start at $25/month, limited free plan
sendinblue is one of the free email marketing services you can use to create your next email campaign and manage your email lists in no time. With the email service, you can maintain good list hygiene by recognizing unengaged subscribers and soft bounces.
In addition, sendinblue’s ability to use user data will help you filter your email subscribers based on specific characteristics to determine high-quality leads. For advanced users, the platform allows you to automate your list maintenance through automation workflows.
When it comes to deliverability, sendinblue has a good sender score for sending your messages to your subscribers’ inbox, avoiding the spam folder and unsubscribe button.
Overall, sendinblue is a great email list organization solution to keep your lists organized. however, the 300 email daily limit can be a pain.
7 Essential Best Practices for Email List Management
Contact list management is possible with a great tool. however, without the right practices, it will be difficult to build your email list!
To help you out, we’ve compiled the essential email list management best practices to make good use of your tools and your time. Let’s see!
1. segment your target audience
Dividing your new subscribers into groups with similar interests will help you better target them and increase your revenue in no time. but how can you start segmenting your audience?
First, market segmentation has four distinct types: demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic. More specifically, demographic, psychographic, and geographic segmentation allows you to divide your target audience based on their age, gender, educational level, values, or location.
Behavioral targeting, on the other hand, is a bit more complicated and is based on the behavior patterns of your subscribers like:
- interaction (opens, clicks, etc.)
- customer journey stage
- list subscription/unsubscription
- behavior purchase and more
for example, here’s how aliexpress leverages ecommerce customer segmentation to re-engage with your email subscribers:
either a personalized welcome email or a re-engagement campaign; user data will help you create engaging emails with custom subject lines and email content to win over your audience.
And speaking of subject lines, don’t forget that you need a strong impression trigger, worlds free of spam to get the open rates you want. if you’re having trouble, make sure you use a good subject line tester to help you out!
2. take advantage of contact tags
While segmentation will help you group your new subscribers into manageable chunks, sometimes you may need a little more to target them more effectively. to do that, you can use contact tags or, in other words, a bit of extra information.
Contact tags can take several forms. You can assign an “open webinar” or “downloaded eBook” label to segment users based on their actions. By using content tags, you can easily track where they are in the customer journey and decide what to send to convert them.
moosend, for example, allows you to assign custom fields (a fancier name for tags) to customize your campaigns and your email subject lines.
taking advantage of tags will help you create dynamic campaigns. this means that the content of a single campaign will change depending on the recipient and the information you have collected about them.
using contact tags is essential; every email list management tool understands that. for that, the moosend platform will give you access to contact tags to help you create better and more targeted email marketing campaigns that drive conversions.
try moosend to see how the contact tag system works and how it will help you master your list management.
3. filter your email subscribers
Whether you have a smaller or larger list, knowing how your email subscribers are engaging with your campaigns is essential. Filtering your contacts will help you understand what your audience needs and how to best target them.
Some of the most important metrics to consider are your open rate, bounce rate, and click-through rate. With filtering, you’ll be able to target subscribers based on their behaviors.
In a nutshell, filtering your audience based on those metrics will help you:
- create targeted re-engagement campaigns
- add more personalization elements
- understand your audience and their needs
subscriber filtering can also be useful when creating new workflows, such as abandoned cart emails, to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right person.
4. maintain list hygiene
List hygiene is the alpha and omega of email list management. As mentioned above, keeping your lists clean will help you deliver your messages to your subscribers’ inboxes. performing regular “list cleanups” will improve your sender reputation and provide you with information about your subscribers and unsubscribes.
To always keep your list clean, be sure to use the following list hygiene techniques:
- remove duplicate contacts
- remove invalid email addresses
- remove soft bounce and hard bounce emails
- update bad addresses typographic
Of course, according to marketingprofs, there are more things to do to keep your list clean:
source
From creating friendly welcome emails to providing an easy way to unsubscribe, everything will help you manage your email list more effectively.
5. get permission from your subscribers
When you start building your list, you want to expand it as fast as possible. while an increased number of subscribers will be more than satisfactory, you should always make sure you have permission from your subscribers.
for example, sending multiple campaigns to subscribers who have opted in to receive a weekly email newsletter will lead to an unfortunate unsubscribe or worse, being marked as spam.
Whatever your goal, let your subscribers choose their preferences before sending them an email to avoid hurting your deliverability. Please note that adding a consent form to your popups is the easiest and most secure option to obtain your permission.
and to avoid having subscribers with invalid emails and save yourself the hassle of having “robots” on your lists, don’t forget to use the power of double opt-in.
then all you need is a confirmation email like this from siege media:
6. re-engage inactive subscribers
Re-engaging your audience is not rocket science. however, it does require a certain level of email copy and cta domain to get your unengaged subscribers to engage with you.
Monitoring the behavior of your subscribers will give you all the data you need to discover your inactive subscribers. And when you do, it’s time to target them with a re-engagement campaign that will remind them why they signed up in the first place.
For your re-engagement campaigns to work, make sure you:
- let your subscribers know the purpose of your email
- use the right tone
- add a cta button to re-engage them
7. bonus: don’t buy email lists
I’m sure you now know what you need to do to improve your email list management. however, there are a few more things I want you to know (or just remember).
First of all, I know that creating a list takes a lot of work. so when someone says, “hey, I’ve got a list you can shop to save time,” the offer can seem irresistible.
However, buying an email list is one of the biggest rookie mistakes you can make. prepared lists can hurt you more as they may have invalid email addresses and an audience that has nothing to do with your product/service.
build your list from scratch. trust me; you won’t regret it!
email list management: done!
To sum it all up, if you want to improve your list management, you need the right tools for trading.
Platforms like moosend and zerobounce are perfect for keeping everything organized and more importantly verified. so if you feel like it, give our platform a try and see how email management works! all you need is to sign up for a moosend account and start managing your subscribers.
And, as I like to say, its tools alone can’t help you achieve great results. so be sure to read the essential contact list management best practices and make email list management a piece of cake.