No matter what business you're in, there are some basic email marketing segments that will always be relevant: new subscribers, openers & losers. Your main goal is to ensure that as many of your subscribers as possible fall into the openers segment and conversely, as few as possible fall into the losers segment. But how do you make sure that this happens? We're going to go over a few best practices that help make sure this happens.

Offer New Subscriber Deals

Many rookie email marketers work hard to get new subscribers, and when they get them they simply throw them into a list with all of the other subscribers. This is detrimental to an email marketing campaign. Obviously, what you want is for your subscribers to convert and buy something and get comfortable responding to your email deals. In order to start your new subscribers off on the right foot from the beginning, you need to have new subscriber-only emails; set-up an auto-responder series to ensure that new readers get special deals right from the beginning. It's important that you do this not only to show how valuable your newsletter is (thus keeping new subscribers for a long time), but also to get your subscribers into a purchasing mindset for your future emails.

Re-Confirm Loser Subscriber Interest

Unfortunately, it's normal to have at least 33% of your email list turn over every six months or so. You definitely want to be proactive about keeping your list clean, but you also don't want to start deleting loser subscribers without making sure that they don't like your emails. What you need to do, then, is to send out a "reconfirmation" email to your loser subscribers asking them to confirm their interest in your email marketing newsletter. Include a subject line such as, "Confirm your subscription..." to double check that they still like your emails. If they ignore the email, then you don't have to feel guilty about deleting them from your list. After all, you're running a business and you certainly don't need to be wasting money on un-appreciative subscribers.

Send Out A Survey

If your campaigns are like most people's, then you will have a large portion of your list that open your emails but don't convert or make a purchase. Certainly, you want these subscribers to start converting, and one of the best ways to improve your performance in this area is to send out a survey and collect data. Ask your subscribers what kind of products or newsletter features they would like to see more, and then act on that information to increase your conversion rates. You need to capitalize on those subscribers that still read your emails and don't convert, and the only way to do this is to ask them what they would like to see. Note, however, that the longer your survey or poll is, the less likely people are going to fill it out. Make sure to keep it simple and very short.

Any email marketing campaign is going to require list segmentation and ongoing testing. Just make sure to implement the above action items to clean up your list and boost future performance, and then sit back and watch the sales increase.