Interested in sending mass emails? You’ll need to create a robust address list so you can properly execute a mail merge in Google Sheets
Are you interested in pursuing email marketing for your business? If you are, then you’ll be able to take advantage of one of the best marketing tools with the highest ROI. Expert marketers estimate that email marketing leads to a $40 return for every $1 invested. These are compelling numbers, but just because email marketing is effective does not mean that it is easy. To begin growing your brand, you need to establish an address list. Your address list is the most important part of an email marketing campaign because you need addresses if you intend to send messages out to your target audience. In this article, we’ll be discussing what an address list is, how to create one, and how to execute a Gmail mail merge to send out your messages. Ready to find out how you can build a quality email list? We’ve got all the answers!
What is an Address List?
Your address list needs to be properly constructed to effortlessly run a mail merge in Google Sheets
Your address list is a list of email addresses and other recipient information that is used to send out mass emails. Commonly, these addresses are gathered either by having people opt-in on your website or by prospecting. If you have ever entered your email address on a website popup, you have entered your information into a business’ address list. Encouraging site visitors to enter their addresses to build your list is a great strategy, but only if you have a good amount of site visitors already.
Prospecting, on the other hand, is another way that marketers build their mailing lists. The process involves finding publicly available information from social media accounts—most frequently from either Facebook or LinkedIn. While prospecting takes more effort, it is a great way to get your list started if you do not already have an established brand.
As you establish your list, you will enter these addresses in Google Sheets—the most commonly preferred method for a mail merge. As you create campaigns, you will need to constantly update your address list to make sure that no information is out of date and all of your recipients are still active. Once you have enough addresses to start your first campaign, you’ll initiate a mail merge in Google Sheets to personalize your messages for each individual recipient. The more information you can collect for your address list, the better you will be able to personalize each message.
Now that we’ve taken a moment to go over what an address is and how it works, let’s take a look at the best ways that you can start, grow, and manage your address list to run the best mass email campaign possible.
1. Find the Right Mass Email Tool
A mass email tool is essential for automatic list updates and initiating a mail merge in Google Sheets
The first step you should take before building your mailing list is to find a preferred mass email tool. A mass email tool is a service designed to help businesses of all sizes send out high-quality personalized emails to their target audience. These tools have a long list of functions to help you send out the best possible messages with a high deliverability rate. When you are looking for a mass email tool to start your email campaign, make sure you are choosing a tool that includes these features:
- Personalization capabilities via mail merge in Google Sheets
- Easy-to-use design capabilities
- Comprehensive reporting
- Automatic mailing list updates
- Message throttling
- A/B testing
- Option for campaign segmentation
While you may not understand each of these features as you start your first campaign, they are all essential for gathering data and running future campaigns. For example, you won’t be able to reap the benefits of automatic address list updates until you launch your second campaign. Automatic list updates take the hard work out of maintaining your address list by identifying out-of-date information based on the analytics from the previous campaign. By examining deliverability rates and open rates, your mass email tool can automatically identify and remove inactive addresses.
2. Maintain Your Address List
A well-maintained address list is the key to high deliverability and open rates for your next campaign
As we just discussed, it is important to choose a mass email tool with automatic address list updates. This is an essential practice for all email marketers, otherwise, they risk getting flagged as spam. Getting flagged as spam is one of the things email marketers try to avoid the most as it affects your address reputation. If you neglect your address list, you will end up sending out messages to inactive email accounts. If your messages are being sent to inactive accounts, they will not be delivered properly. The more your messages are unable to be delivered, the more your email provider will mark your address as spam—which hurts your email sender reputation. As your reputation declines, you will notice that fewer and fewer of your messages are actually being delivered due to a poor reputation.
Remember, people change their email addresses more often than you think—especially if it is a work or university address. So you must use your mass email tool to automatically update your address list in addition to manually making sure all of your addresses are up to date.
3. Avoid Buying an Address List
Buying a mailing list will lead to a damaged address reputation
A common pitfall for many first-time email marketers is purchasing a mailing list from a website. While it may seem like a way to circumvent the prospecting process, buying an email list is never recommended. All too often these lists either contain out-of-date, or incorrect information which can prove to be disastrous for marketing campaigns. Additionally, these lists are most likely being bought by many other marketing newcomers, which means that you will be sending your messages to people who are already being inundated with other mass emails. In other words, these are not quality leads—and that is the best-case scenario. Yikes! Worst case scenario is that you have paid money for fake or expired addresses. If you have purchased an illegitimate mailing list, you’ll torch your address reputation with your very first campaign. The only way to build a reputable address list is by having your audience opt-in or through prospecting.
4. Give Your Audience Incentive
A bit of incentive is a powerful tool to grow your audience
If you are trying to build an address list from scratch, you may initially find it difficult to get people to offer their information. This is especially true if you are a relatively new business that has not yet had time to cultivate high levels of site traffic. To overcome a low sign-up rate, we recommend offering your audience some type of incentive. There are a lot of different ways to provide value depending on your business and target audience. You can offer your audience product discounts, run a giveaway or another type of contest, or offer exclusive content. By giving site visitors a reason to give you their information people will be much more likely to sign up. With the right kind of incentive, you might be surprised at how many people are willing to give out their information.
5. Use Gamification to Entice Site Visitors
Beyond offering incentives, there are other ways to encourage your visitors to input their email addresses
Another way that marketers can gather more information from their customer base is by incorporating gamification into the incentivized prompt. Gamification is proven to engage audiences in a way that feels fun and intuitive, as opposed to forced. Instead of being asked to input your information, your audience can participate in a game that has different incentives to win. Usually, these gamification elements take the shape of classic arcade games like spin-the-wheel, simple racing games, or probability guessing games. By engaging your audience and creating a sense of fun and excitement, people will be more likely to input their information.
We hope that you learned a few strategies to properly build and maintain your address list. While getting started with email marketing can be difficult and time-consuming—the ROI is absolutely worth it. Make sure you start with a mass email service that you feel is best for your company so you can reap all of the benefits associated with running a mail merge in Google Sheets, automatic list updates, and more! From there, creating an address list is all about finding quality leads through address collection via a site popup or prospecting. Once you have found enough quality leads, you are ready to start your first email marketing campaign.
