Starting an email list is a great step to help you grow your business. There are so many benefits including:

• Helping you to keep in touch with your audience 
• Building a list of ideal clients who are engaged, warm and receptive to your new offers and services
• Building trust with your audience
• Sharing content in a different format than on social media
• Being able to use automation and email nurture sequences to help you build relationships and get away from constantly having to be present online
• Being able to segment your audience and make more exclusive, tailored offers

And when you are just starting out there’s a lot to get your head around, good housekeeping is often one of the last things on your mind. You’re just happy to see people joining your list!

But,  you’ll thank yourself later by starting these things off early (trust me!) and so in today’s blog, I’m sharing three good housekeeping tips to help you start your email list off right and, so you can use your email list as a powerful tool to grow your business in the months and years to come!

1. Use tags as people join your email list so you can later segment your audience.

As your list grows using tags will help you will be able to make more tailored and relevant offers to different groups of people on your list. For example, if your lead magnet was sharing Instagram tips to improve reach, you know they are more likely to be interested when you want to sell your Instagram masterclass! You might therefore tag anyone downloading that lead magnet with the tag INSTATIPS. This means when you come to make your offer of your masterclass you can easily find any groups on your list that may be more interested than others. 

This means you don’t always have to send everything to everyone and hope for the best – sending more targeted emails helps you to send more relevant information and offers and will improve your open and click-through rates.

 It’s also a good idea to tag people when they buy from you. People who buy from you are more likely to buy from you again in the future so it’s useful to be able to easily identify them with a tag. This also allows you to make special offers to them knowing they have purchased from you in the past.

2. Don’t add people to your main email list straight away

If people are joining your email list by downloading a lead magnet and are going to go through a curated set of emails called an email nurture sequence, it’s a good idea NOT to add them to your main list until they have completed this sequence. There are a few reasons for this:

• The nurture sequence has a specific focus and job and often it’s important they receive these in the right order. If you are also sending out other emails in-between, this is going to divert their focus.
• Your email sequence will be on a specific topic, for example, Instagram. If you email out to your main list talking about something completely off topic this may confuse our new subscriber. Remember – they may not know very much about you yet!
• If your new subscriber gets too many emails within the first few/days weeks – this may annoy them and they could end up leaving your list

It’s good practice to make sure your new subscriber has finished their sequence and then gets added to your main mailing list. You can usually set this trigger within your automated workflow.

3. Keep your list clean and tidy by removing inactive people

• It might feel counterintuitive to do this, but it’s a really good idea to remove inactive people from your list (and people whose emails bounce!) – there’s just no point in having them on there!
• If people aren’t opening your emails it impacts your open rates. Managing your list and keeping it curated in this way means you can use your open rates to help you gain insight into your business. Having lots of inactive subscribers will skew your open rates and so they won’t be much help to you at all! Make it a commitment to check your list every 3 months. Decide on a set period of time (for example if someone hasn’t opened an email in 6 months) and remove anyone who hits your criteria!
• Another reason to do this is that as your list grows, you will have to start paying to have people on it – you don’t want to pay for people who aren’t even opening your emails, do you?

These simple tips will help you create an email list that’s going to be a real asset to your business and it’s much better (and easier!) to implement these tips now than later down the line. Doing so will help you use your email list as a powerful and intentional tool to grow your business. After all, if you are going to dedicate time to using email as part of your strategy, you want it to be as effective as it can be!

Love these tips? Please leave me a comment below and let me know how you get on!

If you’re ready to start using email to attract your ideal clients to your business, build trust and make more sales then get in touch to chat about my 1:1 coaching options.

Together we can create an intentional content marketing strategy that will help you achieve your goals and attract your ideal clients to your business on autopilot.

From creating a lead magnet to building the landing page, writing the emails and knowing how to attract traffic to your list – we’ll work together to give you the confidence and knowledge you need to set up and use email marketing to grow your business.

Check out 1:1 coaching options and book a free 45 minute coaching call.