Email continues to do so much of the heavy lifting for marketers, creating and maintaining long-lasting customer relationships.

Email is most effective at inspiring customers to take action, and it directly contributes to your bottom line with an average return on investment per $1 spent of $36—higher than any other marketing channel.

Sounds like a good one to keep on the team. Heck, email might even qualify for a nice promotion.

Without exception, every successful email program is built on a foundation of a solid email list. So...

First Things First: Your List

Great email marketing end results begin with a list of subscribers who want to hear from you and who have opted in to do so.

And, of course, the bigger your list, the better—so long as those subscribers are engaged and genuinely interested in your products and services, so that your efforts feed into your bottom line.

That means not simply purchasing a list. Rather, you'll need to make a more grassroots effort, which might consist of some or all of the following (depending on your specific industry and company circumstances):

• Adding a subscriptions box or contact form with opt-in fields to your website, preferably high up on the page so that it won't be missed
• Employing a pop-up contact form for lead capture on your website
• Attaching subscription prompts and links to your team's email signatures
• Collecting email addresses at live events
• Posting invitational links on social media to further your relationships with the audiences that are already actively engaging with your brand
• Including subscription links within your emails, along with requests for subscribers to share your messages with their friends
• Offering personal assessment quizzes that ask for an email address to deliver the results
• Running contests and giveaways that also encourage participants to share the promotional links with their contacts in return for additional entries
• Partnering with complementary brands, blogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts that also serve your audience to cross-promote each other's email programs
• Incentivizing subscribers to share with their contacts

Stimulate signups by offering some kind of incentive, such as a discount or free resource (e-book or printable resource, checklist, template, webinar or tutorial, infographic, case study, recipe, short consultation, sweepstakes entry, and so on).

Be strategic in what you offer: Align it with your business goals so that you attract potential customers, not just people who like freebies. For example, design your incentive to address a specific challenge that your best customers commonly have and that your company can effectively help them solve.

It will also work to your advantage to have new subscribers explicitly opt in. Although such permissions are not mandated in the US (whereas Canada and much of Europe do have such mandates), most marketers find that subscribers who willingly opt in will display stronger engagement.

To ensure high-quality subscribers, a double opt-in process will trump an unchecked subscribe box, which is in turn better than a prechecked box.

You want people who choose to subscribe, and who remember subscribing, so that they will open your emails, stay subscribed, and not report your messages as spam. And not just because that better serves your business goals, but also because those subscriber actions are taken into account when an email provider (such as Gmail) determines whether your message will even make it into someone's inbox.

You can minimize unsubscribes by managing subscriber expectations from the get-go, by clearly communicating what types of communications they'll receive and in what frequency, and by enabling subscribers to indicate their content and frequency preferences.

For example, you can offer a selectable list of topics/products, and/or the types of communications they'd like to receive if you send more than purely promotional emails, and/or options for monthly or bimonthly digests instead of daily or weekly emails.

Email Unsubscribes: Not All Bad

Undoubtedly, some people will unsubscribe, and it's better to make that option clearly available to them—and simple to follow, so that they're less likely to click that spam complaint button, which can negatively impact the deliverability of your future campaigns.

Also give subscribers a change-of-address option, in case that's the holdup. Also provide opt-down options for reduced frequency, the ability to select their content preferences as described above, and/or links to connect with you via other channels, such as social media, an RSS feed, and/or SMS text messaging, so that this doesn't have to be the final goodbye for those who simply wish to lessen their inbox load.

For examples of how to handle unsubs, check out "Five Ways to Minimize Email List Unsubscribes."

Email List Maintenance

A clean and engaged list also requires regular upkeep, which can take various forms:

• Employing list validation, verification, and hygiene tools to ensure the addresses you've collected continue to be viable—especially if your open rates are low, you're sending to a list you haven't reached out to in a while (or ever), or you're migrating to a new platform
• Ensuring all unsubscribes have been removed from your list
• Deleting any duplicate addresses, which can also reduce your expenses
• Suppressing any addresses that have marked your email as spam or otherwise filed complaints against you
• Immediately removing any addresses that return a hard bounce, which indicates that the address is nonfunctioning and permanently undeliverable, unless there's a glaring error in the address that you can fix
• Keeping track of soft bounces, checking those addresses for errors, and suppressing any address that returns three soft bounces in a row because when more than 2% of your emails bounce, your sender reputation score declines and so can your deliverability rates
• Removing role-based addresses, such as "sales@company.com"—too many of these can be a red flag for email providers on the lookout for spammers
• Auditing subscribe as well as unsubscribe processes to ensure each continues to work as intended
• Running win-back campaigns at least annually in an attempt to re-engage subscribers who have not interacted with any of your emails in at least 6-12 months and removing any nonresponders (this series of messages should offer steep discounts to woo them back, clear and compelling reasons to stay subscribed, opt-down options as described above, and direct notice that they will be removed from your list if you do not hear from them within a designated timeframe)
• Surveying less-active subscribers to determine how you might get them more engaged

In addition to optimizing list performance, those types of tasks will help improve your delivery rates.

This article is part of a series on email marketing based on the comprehensive e-book How to Make Email Work Even Harder for You by Acoustic and MarketingProfs. The 70-page e-book is available for download (reg. required, but it's free); it's written by Kimberly Smith, whom you can reach at dtkgsmith@gmail.com.