Best Practices and Methods to Grow Your Email List Organically

4 min readAug 25, 2021

Maintaining a healthy email list is essential in achieving your goal to make a company grow. Therefore, effective email marketing is what you need to help you in many ways, especially in generating more data for your leads.

But, how can we grow an email list more and at the same time sustain your revenue or ROI?

We have prepared best practices that you can apply to ensure a good and healthy set of addresses and organically grow an email list for your organization. At the end of this article, you will also have additional insights about email marketing and how you can make it productive for your sales.

Email List Management Basics

What is an Email List? — A collection of demographics: email address, name, and phone number of consumers interested in your product/service and opted to receive updates from your brand. This is also a way to do segmentation for all your data.

You should also look at your email list as a list of your possible loyal customers to help your business grow and generate a positive outcome when it comes to sales. But, where do we get this data? Email marketers have various platforms for generating leads or a Lead Generator.

Lead Generator — A marketing strategy that uses techniques and forms to successfully obtain necessary data from your prospect customers. Today, social media can become a great lead generator, for example through free sign-ups, and can maximize your email list significantly. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are widely used to magnet valuable customers.

Email List management includes actions that can grow the number of your subscribers or customers. That is why it is vital to take care of it the right way. When we say email list management, it also covers bounce email management and unsubscribed users management.

In addition, proper email list management will let you master how to get more consumer’s attention and make them loyal to your brand. Managing this list can further help your company to properly do segmentation and make a credible as well as a hygienic list that you can depend on.

What is a Hygienic Email List?

Factors that can contribute to a clean list are churns and engagement emails used by your organization. Make it more efficient and reliable, and do not keep what is not adding value to your mailing list.

NOTE: Some may resort to buying leads to grow an email list but keep in mind that it will attract an irrelevant audience and may damage your reputation in the long run.

Since most Lead Generation happens using a free process, it is advisable to run a test to know what platform generates more leads for your company. Once you are able to identify what platform to utilize in gaining more sign-ups, it is time to optimize and practice these techniques we have prepared for you.

Clean Your List

Based on the study, an active mailing list could be decreased by 20–30 % yearly, and that is just normal. Many would say that this is the opposite of growing an email list. But in reality, it is a result of the different behavior of your subscribers. Because of that, email list cleaning plays a special role in generating new ones or reactivating inactive customers.

Here are some best practices that you can apply to achieve a hygienic mailing list:

1. Use Double Opt-In

A double opt-in is also called a confirmed opt-in, and it is a method of obtaining new subscribers by sending a confirmation link to their email address to make sure they wanted to subscribe to your newsletters and other commercial emails. We always recommend using double opt-in when you collect new leads.

The advantage of double opt-in compared to single opt-in is that it doesn’t add email addresses with obvious typos to your database. Double opt-in allows to avoid malicious subscriptions, subscriptions made by bots, auto-reply email addresses, and spam traps. Some may argue that it drastically reduces contact database. But, quality beats quantity in email marketing. A smaller list of active and engaged recipients can bring a higher ROI and help you build good sender reputation.

2. Remove Hard Bounce / Unsubscribes

Just as people change location, interests, jobs, they can change email addresses. It can lead to some email addresses on your email list becoming invalid and producing hard bounce emails. Hard bounce email addresses must be removed from an active database after the first bounce. Repetitive sending to hard bounce email addresses is a negative signal to ISP when it comes to calculating your sender reputation.

Unsubscribed users are the recipients who decided to leave your list for any reason. If they don’t find an unsubscribe link in your email, they may report it as spam. Spam complaints generated by these recipients will significantly affect your reputation and email deliverability in a negative way.

With that said, setting up a good bounce and unsubscribe management process is must have for all email marketers who use their own email systems. Email service providers normally handle bounce emails and unsubscribes for their users internally.

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