Maximise Your Email List's Potential: Three strategies to keep your list healthy, active and engaged.

Create an email list that works for you. With these smart housekeeping strategies, you can build trust, boost engagement, and secure a loyal audience.

Email marketing is a powerhouse tool that often gets overlooked in the early stages of business building. It’s a brilliant way to keep in touch with your followers, build trust, and make additional sales away from the noisy social media space where you’re constantly vying for attention.

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

• 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

• Ensuring you are connected with your audience outside of social media should something happen to your account.

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 it’s important that it goes beyond adding names. When done correctly, a few simple steps now can set you up for sustainable growth, better engagement, and a loyal community of clients.

You’ll thank yourself later for starting these things early (trust me!). The later you leave implementing these things, the harder it is, and you’ll realise you have lost a lot of valuable opportunities by leaving them for so long!  In today’s blog, I’m sharing three good housekeeping tips to help you start your email list and use it as a powerful tool to grow your business in the months and years to come!

1. Use tags as people join your lists to segment your audience later.

As your list grows, using tags will help you 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. When you come to make your masterclass offer, 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 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 purchase from you again in the future, so it’s helpful to identify them with a tag quickly. This also lets you make special offers to them, knowing they have purchased from you in the past. Here is a list of inways you could start tagging and segmenting your email list:

• Lead Magnet Name (e.g., "INSTATIPS" or "SEO_GUIDE") – Tag subscribers based on the lead magnets they signed up for, helping you identify what topics they're interested in.

• New Subscriber – Use this tag for all new subscribers through your welcome or nurture sequence. Remove the tag once they complete the sequence.

• Engaged – Tag subscribers who frequently open or click on your emails. This will help you identify your most active subscribers and prioritise engagement efforts.

• Inactive—This tag is for subscribers who haven't opened an email in a certain period (e.g., 3-6 months). It is helpful for re-engagement campaigns or when considering list clean-up.

• Customer – Tag subscribers who have made a purchase. This lets you distinguish buyers from leads and helps with future upselling or exclusive offers.

• Interest-Based Tags (e.g., "Instagram", "Email Marketing", "Website Design") – Use these tags based on what topics subscribers engage with most to send them more tailored content.

• Re-engagement – Tag subscribers who go through a re-engagement sequence. This helps you keep track of who has been contacted to see if they’ve re-engaged or need to be removed.

• Event Attendee – Tag anyone who has registered for or attended your webinars, workshops, or other events. This helps with follow-up emails and future event promotions.

• Content Preference (e.g., "Blog Updates", "Case Studies", "Tutorials") – Tag based on specific types of content that subscribers prefer to receive.

Email marketing is a powerhouse tool that often gets overlooked in the early stages of business building.

2. Don't add people to your primary email marketing 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 that they receive these in the right order. If you also send out other emails in between, this will divert their focus.

• Your email sequence will be on a specific topic, such as Instagram. If you email your main list about something completely off-topic, this may confuse our new subscribers. Remember—they may not know very much about you yet!

• If your new subscriber gets too many emails within the first few/days or weeks - this may annoy them, and they could end up leaving your list.

It’s good practice to ensure that your new subscribers have finished their sequence and are then 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, 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!

• Your open rates will be impacted if people aren’t opening your emails. This makes it hard to gauge your actual data accurately (e.g., the people who are interested in your content and more likely to buy from you!).

• Make it a commitment to check your list every three months. Decide on a set period to work to; for example, if someone hasn’t opened an email in six months, you might set that as the point at which you will delete them. (At this point, you could put people through a re-engagement sequence before deleting them to give them a final opportunity to re-engage and stay on your list.)

• 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?

Managing and curating your list in this way will keep it healthy, allowing you to use your open rates to gain insight into your business. 

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