Corporate Holiday eCards - Tips for Managing your Holiday Email List
One of the hardest tasks with any holiday eCard campaign is going through your contacts and creating a clean, up-to-date email list.
An email list with outdated email addresses may affect your email open rates so it's imperative to verify that your email list is up-to-date and to continue to remove any bounce backs or unsubscribe requests that you receive from every email campaign.
This step-by-step checklist will help you:
- Prepare your email list
- Import and manage contacts in your CorpNote address book
- Use CorpNote to manage subscribes and unsubscribes
- Build your email list for future email marketing campaigns
- Share holiday eCards with contacts in social media or visitors to your website/blog
Prepare your Email List
You will get the most out of your holiday email campaign by creating a quality email list. It's equally important that the people on your email list have given you permission to send them email because it's more likely they will open an email from you if they have.
Most contact manager software allows you to export a .csv file with your contacts. Technically, all you need is the email address of your contacts but, if you are planning to import your contacts into your CorpNote address book, you will need a .csv file with each contact's first name, last name and email address.
If you want to set up an automated email campaign for your holiday eCards, or you want to create future email campaigns for occasions such as birthday eCards, you may also wish to include Company, Category (such as vendors or clients), Birthday, Anniversary and Start Date. The "Start Date" field can be used for when a contact became a customer or the date an employee was hired.
TIP: Give your exported contact list a recognizable name that includes the date you last edited it. For example: Holiday-eCard-List-10-16-2018.csv
Optional: Once you have saved your data as a .csv file, you may want to open it up in MS Excel or another spreadsheet program to delete columns that contain unnecessary or unwanted data and then save it with a new file name so you do not over-write your original. Make sure you save this new file as a .csv file. For example: Holiday-list-CorpNote-10-15-17-Final.csv
CorpNote Address Book Features
The following features will be enabled if you import your contacts into your CorpNote address book:
- 'Mail-merge' each recipient's first name in the eCard greeting, e.g. Dear [first name]
- Track eCard and invitation pickup by a contact's name instead of just email address
- Easily identify a contact if they unsubscribe from your email list
- Create email lists that enable you to send a holiday eCard to up to 2,500 recipients with a single click and segment your contacts into groups such as current clients, potential clients, vendors, colleagues etc.
- Set automated holiday eCard campaigns that can randomize from your pre-designed holiday eCards or send them in a specific sequence.
- View a contact's history of all the eCards, invitations and surveys sent to a contact and their responses.
Concerned about what CorpNote does with your personal contact information? We NEVER use or share your contact list. View CorpNote's privacy policy
Import Contacts into your CorpNote Address Book
After you upload your .csv file, we can help you sort through duplicate contacts and missing information. Just follow the on-screen prompts. You will be able to review your contacts before finalizing the import.
Check our tutorial for detailed instructions and a list of common questions and answers.
Once your contacts have been imported, we recommend that you create email lists. This is a huge time saver as it will make sending eCards to large lists or sending eCards to different types of contacts (such as clients or employees) much easier. When sending your eCard, you can just select the email list you want to send to and CorpNote will automatically address your eCard to those recipients.
Special notes for managing invitation contacts: Each time you send an invitation, your recipients are automatically added to your consolidated Invitation List. Even if you send multiple invitations using different eCards on different days for the same event, the Invitation List lets you easily track and follow up with all of the people you invited.
Keep your Email List Up-to-Date Throughout the Year
Bigger is not always better when it comes to email lists. A small targeted email list of valuable contacts will get you the best open rate. You could send an email to thousands of contacts but if you only get 5% of those people opening your email, that's not a huge win for your effort.
An email list of contacts that have given you permission to send them email will yield the best open rate.
Not only does this make you GDPR compliant, your contacts are also more likely to open an email from you if they have given you permission. If your recipients have no idea who you are, they'll mark your emails as spam or unsubscribe from your list, and then you are done with the opportunity to reach their inbox.
Continually refining your email list throughout the year enables you to get the best open rate. It's important to diligently remove contacts from your email list for which you have received a "bounce back" or an undeliverable message. This will give you a more accurate open rate percentage since you will have cleaned your email list to have a more accurate number of your total recipients that you are likely to reach.
Removing contacts who have unsubscribed will also help keep your email list clean and improve your open rate percentage. Each eCard you send has a 'Manage Your Email Preferences' link. eCard recipients can select to unsubscribe from your email list and your CorpNote address book is automatically updated. Future eCards will not be sent to this contact even if you leave their contact information in your CorpNote address book.
However, we do recommend that you remove unsubscribed contacts from your address book to keep it clean. This can easily be done by clicking on the unsubscribed contacts tab in your address book and clicking the delete icon next to that contact's name or using the multi-delete function. From this page, you can also download your unsubscribed list as a .csv file and update your email list in other email programs you are using.
Contacts can subscribe to your email list in two ways. They can click on the 'Manage Your Email Preferences' link on a CorpNote email that has been forwarded to them or you can use the direct link to your subscribe form in any type of communicate you distribute. When people subscribe, you will see these contacts on your account welcome screen. From there, you can add them to your CorpNote address book.
Bonus Tip: Your online address book can be exported as a .csv file for use in other programs such as MS Excel. This way you can easily download your CorpNote address book contacts and not have to worry about losing your information if you deactivate your CorpNote membership.
Build your Email List
There are lots of ways to build your email list. Regardless of the strategy you use, make sure you tell people why giving their email address to you will be a benefit to them, such as receiving discounts, special offers, birthday deals, exclusive content, a tip of the day etc.
Here are just a few ideas to get you thinking:
- Your website and blog should have a form where people can sign up to receive emails from you.
- Guide people to your sign up form in articles you write and in social media posts etc.
- If you have a brick-and-mortar store (physical business location) or you are at a trade show, always have a paper or online sign-up form to encourage immediate sign up.
- Offer a one-time discount or something free for new subscribers.
Share holiday eCards with contacts in social media or visitors to your website/blog
Sometimes you do not have an 'email list' for your contacts. For example, you may have thousands or millions of contacts in social media but the only way you can contact them is through social media. This is where sharing holiday eCards in social media or on your website is the perfect solution!
