Whatever your reason for using multiple email service providers, we’re sure you’re looking for ways to manage your current situation not only efficiently but effectively. It can be stressful making sure that every component of your email marketing program is running smoothly, especially when you’re juggling more than one email service provider. There could be a number of reasons you’ve ended up here:

1. You’ve amassed an assortment of niche email providers that you use for different purposes.
2. You’ve  been bought and sold a few times meaning you have several ESPs for different branches or divisions.
3. Your homegrown solution is no longer the best fit and now you’re ready to move to a more robust platform.

As a marketer you’re already utilizing this ROI rich channel, but how do you do it better? It’s important to be able to share and communicate your data between platforms. Job number one: you’re going to need to centralize your data. Syncing Providers Shouldn’t be a Headache Maintaining multiple ESPs is not completely unmanageable, but you will need to implement the right tools for the job. It’s time to implement a centralized hub that your data can live in. Creating an environment for all your data to peacefully coexist between ESPs has several benefits:

1. List Hygiene. Removing all hard bounces will help your deliverability stay high. Removing any email addresses that brands share will cut down on the amount of sending that you’re doing (though hopefully not too much). It will also keep your customers feeling good about your campaign and not annoyed that they received multiples emails with the same message.
2. Keeps your brand CAN-SPAM compliant. If a customer decides that they no longer want to receive emails from a company you’re working with and have unsubscribed, you’ll definitely want to be able to remove them from your co-marketing campaign sending list. While this is going a step beyond being compliant it’s important to always maintain a current database of customers who have unsubscribed from your email lists. A customer marking your email as SPAM will not only affect your deliverability it can affect your reputation.
3. Protect your deliverability and ultimately your bottom line. Sending emails that never arrive because of defective addresses can negatively influence your sender reputation. That increases the likelihood that your emails don’t make it to the inbox. Emails that don’t get delivered mean emails that don’t get opened, don’t get clicked, and don’t generate revenue. The bottom line is undelivered emails affect your bottom line. You can never accurately calculate the amount of money you don’t make when emails don’t land where they should.

Investigate using a company that can assist you with list management. Scrubbing email addresses before you send is a vital part of an email program. Using or partnering with a company that can smartly and easily identify and remove invalid or unsubscribed email addresses from your lists will free up your time so that you can focus on the strategy of crafting a superb campaign not the logistics.

Take Away

Clean lists are important, but keeping them that way can get complicated when multiple ESPs are involved. Luckily there are tools available to keep your deliverability on track, your customers happy, and your money in your pocket. While not ideal, having multiple ESP’s does not mean you cannot protect yourself from losing money. This article was originally published on UnsubCenntral.

It’s that time of year again. The time of year when marketing teams are busy preparing and deploying their holiday campaigns. You may have recently noticed an uptick in the number of emails received in your inbox. With the hustle and bustle of the season, here are 5 great tips to help create successful holiday campaigns. 1. Plan in advance According to the National Retail Foundation, over 40% of people plan to start their holiday shopping by October. With consumers starting their holiday shopping early, marketers need to get ahead of the curve with a strategy and plan. Start early by thinking about key send dates, frequency of emails, what your marketing calendar will look like, creative and production. 2. Personalize it As busy marketers, it’s easy to forget that there is an actual person on the receiving end of the email. According to Aberdeen, click through rates are improved by an average of 14% and conversions by 10% when using personalization. Use personalization to connect to your customers. First name is great, but using dynamic content based on data you’ve collected on the customer’s usage, likes and preferences will leave a lasting impression of your brand. 3. Use email validation With all the planning and hard work it takes to create a holiday email campaign, the last thing you want to find out is that your emails didn’t reach your customers inbox. Using an email validation tool, like ZeroBounce ensures a deliverability rate of 98% or higher through:

• Email bounce detection - removes invalid emails from your list to prevent email bounces
• Email abuse and spam trap detection - removes know email complainers and spam traps
• Email data append - appends missing data such as first and last name, gender, location, city, state/region, and country when the registration IP is provided.

This can help increase the 85% average (in all industries) inbox placement rate by managing bounce rates to drive more business and reach your customers. 4. Utilize segmentation We’ve heard the saying that no two people are alike. It’s goes without saying that remembering this saying when planning our campaign, or any campaign in general will go along way. Targeting the right person with the right message is half the battle. Research down by MailChimp shows that segmented campaigns get 14.64% more opens and 59.99% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns. For your holiday campaigns focus on key customer groups like:

• Subscribers who brought last year during the holiday season
• New subscribers
• Inactive subscribers
• Your most loyal customers
• Demographics like age, location, interests

The more you know about your audience, the better you can segment and send targeted messages which will lead to more conversions. 5. Be creative Part of the planning ahead is creating exciting and engaging creative/content to engage your audience. Let the creative juices flow, maybe you draw on the emotion of the season, create an engaging video email, send a silly GIF or a fun interactive email. Whatever type of creative you design, make it stand out from the rest in the sea of holiday emails. Get inspired with these tips to help you create a winning holiday email campaign. What will you be doing for your holiday campaign this year?

One of the most frequently asked questions we receive is, “How can I grow my email list?" Of course we have several best practices we are happy to share; however, another just as important question we need to be asking is “What are you doing to prevent people from leaving your list?" One easy solution to reduce your list attrition rates comes in the form of an email preference center. We highly recommend for all email – and even SMS – marketing programs to leverage preference centers. What is that? A preference center is a landing page on your brand’s website that allows your subscribers to add, change, or delete their email preferences. For example, if you have more than one newsletter or type of email offer, you can provide a list of these programs for your subscribers to select which they would like to receive. Or if your brand has several categories of content or even categories of products, your subscriber could select only to receive information about specific ones. An even more sophisticated preference page may ask the subscriber how many emails or how often they would like to receive your emails. By giving the subscriber control, you can reduce your attrition rates by sending more relevant content hand selected by your subscribers. How does leveraging user preference reduce attrition? When a subscriber chooses to unsubscribe, he or she will more than likely click on a link that says, “Click here to unsubscribe”. As a compliment to this process, we suggest directing your subscriber to a preference center. Leverage your preference center and use introductory verbiage such as “We understand that your needs can change. Would you like to update your preferences to receive more relevant email?” You will not prevent everyone who clicked on your unsubscribe link from continuing to unsubscribe, but you can reduce your unsubscribe rates. This will contribute to the success of your overall email marketing program. Does all that really work? Allowing readers to select their own preferences will not only reduce your attrition rates but increase subscriber engagement as your subscribers become in control of what they want to receive from you. And we are receiving great feedback from our customers who chose to leverage these solutions through PostUp. We invite you to click here to learn how New York Media improved their unsubscribe rate by 76% with PostUp’s Preference Solution. This article was originally published on PostUp.