The people who put the most effort in their email marketing solutions find the greatest success. That’s not just common to email marketing, that’s practically the way everything works! Here are a couple of ways to work a little bit harder and get better email marketing results.

You might have heard that it’s very important to remove in-active subscribers from your mailing list. Definitely a great tip, but before you go crazy eliminating contacts, let’s look at this a little deeper. So, first you’ll need to separate the ‘bad’ or in active-emails, from the good and have them segmented into their own list. This way you can send this not-so-responsive group emails prompting them to take some form of action. This means asking them to click on a link they are interested in your email or getting them to re-sign on to your mailing list. Once this email is sent, you’ll be able to better understand if you can remove a contact, or if you can re-establish a relationship with them. This is an easy way to start having a more targeted list.

It is widely understood that an in-active user is one that has not opened or clicked on links in your email over a given time period. And now we know how important it is to send that group an email to test if they are actually in active. But before you can determine this, you must first understand HOW a contact opens their email, otherwise you might be assuming they are inactive when they could be potential customers.

There are a percentage of people who do not download images in their email programs. The way that tracking open rates works, is that they will not be counted on your data for opens if subscribers do not download the images. However they will still be able to click on the links in your email. So if you attribute your success based on open rates, you might be doing even better than you think! You should also change your strategy to considering both your open rates and the clicks. You will get a much more correct understanding of you which contacts are not active by using the opens and clicks data in your email marketing solutions account.

Before deleting an inactive contact make sure you have taken the time to determine that they REALLY are inactive: give them a chance to re-confirm their interest through one or maybe two emails that are designed to get them to take action, like signing up again to the list or clicking on a link that might be of interest to that contact. Then look through your metrics and see if they haven’t opened or clicked on your email so that you can delete the ones that haven’t.

Another thing to focus in on is keeping a keener eye on ‘Unsubscribe Rates’. If you measure the success of your mailings by looking at which of your contacts have unsubscribed, then here is another bit of info that will make you think twice. Instead of unsubscribing, many users use the “spam” or “junk” button to remove an email from their inbox. This is especially true for senders that the contact deems untrustworthy.

Users that have pressed the junk or spam option will not be counted as unsubscribed. That means that a low amount of unsubscribes does not tell you everything you need to know

Your focus really should be on metrics like ‘opens’ and ‘clicks’ as a measure of your success with email marketing solutions. The better email marketing solutions experts look for ways to read their data to initiate higher quality and more refined contact lists. Knowing the whole story about your data will help you make your list more refined and therefore give you greater email marketing solutions success!

Rudy Barell is a Senior Business Development Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing software used by businesses around the globe. Experience how easy it is to build your mailing list, create eye-catching emails and track your success using detailed reports with the complete email marketing program. Try it free!