This article reviews what agencies and brokers should do once they’ve created an opt-in target prospect list. List building is a separate topic from list maintenance, and one which is worthy of significant discussion. That said, once agencies and brokers have created a list, they should quickly establish list maintenance best practices. Maintaining a clean insurance email list helps agencies and brokers improve their online reputation, increase deliverability, reduce complaints and increase conversion rates. In order to have a clean list you need to manage bounces, age your list, eliminate inactive users and allow subscribers to update information. Here are four important best practices to follow relating to insurance email marketing list health and maintenance:
Manage Bounces: create a policy where you will remove an email after four or more soft bounces. You should also remove all emails after a hard bounce. Hard bounces are typically removed by any quality email marketing engine, but you should check your email database to ensure this is being done correctly. Soft bounce policies vary by vendor, watch those bounces as they impact deliverability and reputation.
No Longer At: Over time people change email addresses, leave a company or lose interest in your organization. An increase in bounce rate can indicate that you need to increase your list maintenance. You should remove employees who are no longer at their company or who have retired after every campaign.
Eliminate Inactive Users: Create a policy where you remove contacts if they don’t open emails or don’t respond to calls to action after a specified period. Or separate these users into multivariate test campaigns to see if you can induce interaction with a completely different approach.
Manage Subscription: Offer subscribers a chance to change the frequency of emails or update their information. This is often better than a simple opt out, as recipients may want to limit frequency instead of completely opting out of your campaigns.
Sending information subscribers no longer want can increase spam complaints. Sending emails to inactive email addresses can hurt your reputation with ISPs. Improve delivery, open rates, click through rates and conversion with proper insurance email marketing list maintenance. Proper list maintenance also helps insurance agency marketers avoid honey pot traps. For those unfamiliar with honeypot traps, let’s review this important aspect of list maintenance to better understand how it applies to insurance agency email marketing.
Let’s say one of the domains your agency is targeting becomes inactive (the company was acquired or the division is no longer functioning). After a period of about 6-12 months, many hosting companies will disable that domain’s email. Then any emails sent to these defunct domains can be automatically routed to blacklists. One example is spamhaus.com. As your domain continues to send to this defunct domain (which often doesn’t return a hard bounce), your ISP reputation is impacted, and your domain can wind up on a black list.
Following the best practices above can help insurance web marketers maintain a cleaner and healthier list. And, it will help ensure they avoid spam traps and honeypots.
