Why it matters for email success
You might have great email content and a well-designed email template, but without smart email list management, your efforts are futile. The whole point of sending email messages out to your contact lists is for them to receive it, engage with it, and click through to your landing pages.
Free email list management is something that’s much easier to accomplish with an email marketing service.
Finding the best list management solution
To optimize email delivery rates, small businesses often look for third-party email marketing platforms and email marketing services that provide free accounts with real-time analytics and excellent deliverability.
Mailgun's platform offers useful features that scale with you, so as you grow, you can send unlimited emails at a great price. And Mailgun gives you excellent customer service at every level.
Best practices of email list management
Managing your mailing list requires that you first have a solid list of contacts who want to hear from you. Purchasing or renting a bunch of email addresses is never a good use of your budget. You want users to opt in to your email newsletters, and the best email marketing tools require users to have permission-based lists.
To make sure you have the right email addresses, you can add email validation to your sign-up forms. Email validation helps ensure that the addresses on your mailing list are valid and error-free so they won’t bounce.
With ISP feedback and automatic suppression’s, you can continually monitor and make updates to your email list to improve open rates for your email campaigns and protect your reputation.
Here’s a closer look at how email marketing services can help you avoid building weak email lists:
Features of a great email list service
Anticipate user errors. Sometimes user errors happen, such as mistyping the name of the email service provider (like hotmial.com instead of hotmail.com). With the right solution, that email can be salvaged. For instance, with Mailgun’s email verification tool, user-entry errors can be caught on sign-up forms. As users enter their information, integrated custom grammar checks in our email validator will catch the most common errors and offer suggestions.
Respect the wishes of email recipients who unsubscribe or report your messages as spam. From a user standpoint, it’s frustrating to receive email marketing messages or email newsletters that you don’t want. And not honoring requests to be removed from your email list will hurt your reputation. With Mailgun’s free service, those emails are automatically suppressed from your contact lists so you can have some peace of mind.
Removing hard bounces. These are addresses that have permanent errors and will never be able to receive your message. A free email list management tool like Mailgun will remove such addresses. Soft bounces, on the other hand, are addresses that might be down temporarily, so your email marketing software or list management provider can still attempt to redeliver. With its email verification tool, Mailgun also helps you reduce your bounce rate by flagging temporary and disposable emails on your email list.
Only send to real humans with email address validation
Overall, Mailgun’s email validations API provides comprehensive email verification and a three-step validation check for each email address on your list. Contact management has never been easier...and it starts before subscribers opt-in on a pop-up, sign up on a landing page signup form, or double opt-in via email.
Easily identify valid emails, role-based addresses, typos, and more for better list hygiene. Our validation tool goes beyond simple grammar rules – we check directly with the mailbox for verification for accurate results you can rely on.
MX records verification
Mail server verification to ensure every email address is valid
Role-based email address verification, like customer support inboxes
Disposable email address verification, so every email address is deliverable
RFC grammar rule check that meets criteria for every email service provider
Suggestions on suspected typos for invalid email addresses
All of these functionalities occur in real-time thanks to Mailgun’s real-time validation API.
With email verification, you won’t waste time and money on email addresses that don’t exist. Keep your sender reputation strong without worrying over the technical details.
Send more targeted email campaigns with list segmentation
Simply put, list segmentation improves open rates and click-through rates for email marketing campaigns. 43.6% of users said segmenting messages so that email content is personalized to their interests is a “very important” factor in determining whether to open it, more than discounts (38.4%) and time-sensitive offers (32.9%).
Mailgun gives you the ability to divide your email list into smaller sections in order to send highly targeted emails — the right messages for the right audiences. For instance, segmentation can be based on company size, demographics, content downloads, and many other factors. The options for automated campaigns are endless:
Welcome emails
Webinar or event invites
Email newsletters
A re-engagement campaign for unengaged subscribers
Discount or promotional emails
Abandoned cart emails
(Need help getting started? Our selection of free email templates can help.)
By default, each Mailgun sending domain can have up to 5,000 active tags, with more tags available upon request. This lets you track each message type and version you send via Mailgun. Every email can be tied to as many as three tags, offering numerous levels of segmentation for your email list.
Tags also make it simple to do A/B testing on your marketing emails so that you can pick the best font sizes, colors, call-to-action messages, and other elements of your email marketing campaign.
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These features of email list management are especially important for a small business or startup that doesn’t have the in-house resources to manage its bulk email program and marketing automation. Without proper email list management, your intended message won’t get to your target audience.
Email list management is an ongoing process, even after your email addresses are collected. With the right editor and tools in place, all of your email campaigns, transactional emails, and email marketing messages will make it into the inboxes of people who want them.
Learn more about Mailgun’s free email services for email list management. Get started with your free trial today.
Check out our plans to bundle together features for better deliverability. For businesses that send over 100,000 emails.
Other features
Explore beyond email list management
Mailgun has a variety of features for companies with large lists and bulk sending needs.