How to make Email List Management 500% Easier

In our research we’ve discovered that managing email lists is a huge burden for today’s professional marketer. We talk every day with people who are frustrated with how difficult it is to manage their email lists. The common steps to manage them are something like this:

1. Gather emails from website submissions (often several locations). Export these emails as a CSV file.
2. Combine these emails, de-duplicate email addresses, and clean the list by getting rid of fake addresses.
3. Import emails into email service provider. (usually as a new list)
4. Write emails specifically for those new lists.
5. Manually send emails to the lists.
6. Repeat every week or, sometimes, every day!

That’s the kicker…this is not a one-time process! This is done repetitively in order to keep lists up to date. We’ve even talked with companies who have several people dedicated 100% of the time to managing email lists…that’s their job!

At Performable we’re trying to solve this problem in a big way. Frankly, it’s a pain for us to do email management and we don’t want to do it any more. But as we were solving this for ourselves we built a new product that we call Engage to help others easily manage their email lists too.

We also identified some other problems with existing email management solutions:

1. Based on a single event. - A single event (usually submitting a form) gets someone on a list.
2. On the list for good. - Once you’re on the list, you’re on the list for good. There is no intelligence to take you off the list unless the list itself changes.
3. Changes to list are managed by hand. - in addition to the repetitive cycles of an initial import/export, any extra management is done by hand as well.

The biggest issue, though, was the single event problem. Shouldn’t email be smarter than that? At Performable we wanted to push further on what kind of events could trigger an email. We wanted any event to trigger an email, even those that don’t require an email to begin with. Our thinking is that if you are lucky enough to have earned your customer’s permission, you should be able to send them an email whenever they do anything interesting. We also wanted our system to recognize subsequent events and take people off the email list when appropriate, too. In other words, we wanted a smart emailing system that does the hard work for you.

So, here is the new workflow in Engage:

1. Create a new drip email in Performable Engage. You select one or more website behaviors that triggers the email (could be visited a certain page, submitted a form, purchased a product, or registered for your application, etc) and you also select any behaviors that stops the email. This allows you to start a drip campaign and then stop it if your customer happens to do something.
2. Write your targeted email (or emails) for this specific drip and save it in your Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor account (interested in another ESP? Let us know)
3. Connect your new drip to your email account in the Engage interface. (usually in one click)
4. Save your drip and you’re DONE.

That’s right. There is no process to repeat. Once you’ve created your drip email Performable handles all the list management (adding/removing/de-duplicating) behind the scenes. No more importing and exporting CSV files. You use your existing email service. That’s important to us…an email tool like Engage is much more powerful right out of the box if it integrates with the systems that you already use.

We think this new workflow is at least 500% easier simply because you don’t have to manage lists by hand. You can find out more about how this works on our Engage page.

Original Article