Whether you started email marketing for your business in 2020 or if you’ve been doing it for a while now, coming to the end of a calendar year is always a good time to undertake some email list management and general housekeeping.

In this blog, I’m sharing four tasks that I suggest you work on this January so that you’re prepared for running your email marketing campaigns in 2021 and that you’re well set up to get some good results.

If you’re coming to this blog post-January 2021, I recommend you do the following as soon as you can, if you haven’t already included this activity in your email marketing strategy.

Here we go...

Four email marketing list management and housekeeping tasks for a successful 2021:

Review your email stats

Take a look at your email campaigns from the past 6-12 months (if you’ve been emailing that long!) and look for any stand out performers when it comes to open and click rates.

Look carefully at what was different or special about those campaigns and ask yourself how you can replicate that performance in 2021 campaigns.

Plan your content

If you don’t do this ahead of time already, this might be a good New Year Resolution for you: plan your email content ahead of time.

Your marketing emails should complement your wider business activity and communicate those key messages to your audience.

Have a look at your 2021 business and marketing plan and plan in some email topics which will help you to achieve your goals.

Run a reengagement campaign

January is a great time to weed out any subscribers who haven’t engaged with an email in 90 days or longer.

To do this, I recommend creating a campaign of three emails to target those subscribers with your best content and invite them to take action (click) to show they are still interested.

The final email in this short series should instruct them to take action (click a link) to stay subscribed. Unsubscribe anyone who doesn’t act (don't fully delete them from your list). Get ready to see higher open and click rates and build your great sender reputation.

Sort out your segments

Have you been using tagging and/or segments to identify what individual subscribers are interested in?

If you have, you might find it can get a bit messy with all the tags and segments so I recommend taking a look at this now and making an effort to tidy them up and rationalise ahead of emailing in January.

Segmentation should allow you to send more personalised content to your list but this only works if you have a system in place, so make sure what you have actually makes sense to you.

Email marketing housekeeping doesn’t need to be a chore!

All of the above will help you to improve your email marketing results and it’s like any maintenance job - the more often you do it, the less onerous it becomes!

Get into the habit of checking your email send results every time. You’ll start to recognise patterns and know what’s good/average/poor for your email list.

Planning your email content should be part of your wider marketing content planning which includes blogs, social media, podcasts etc. Get into the habit of thinking how to repurpose that content over email.

Reengagement campaigns are probably the most difficult of the four tasks above but the good news is that once you’ve set one up, you can automate it to run automatically in the future.

Segmentation is also an advanced email marketing move but don’t let this put you off if you’re a beginner! Sorting out segments and tags in the early days will save you pain in the long run AND you’ll be able to personalise your email content sooner which will give you better results.

How does this all sound? Make sense or does some of it feel out of your depth? Remember, if you need help, you can reach out to me and get a quote for my professional support.

I’d love for you to feel super confident and excited about your email marketing in 2021 and if you’ve realised doing it to a high standard just ain't possible alone, talk to me.

Let me know in the comments below if you are going to do these tasks and if you’ve learned anything new here.