Seed list helps you eliminate mistakes in your email and ensures deliverability to your receiver’s inbox. A seed list assists you in planning an alternative solution if your email fails to deliver appropriately to the seed-listed persons. A marketer uses this seed listing technique before a big push with their new campaign.
Seed listing is one of the first steps to starting an effective email marketing campaign. If you want your email marketing campaign to work great, you must go through systematic planning. Seed listing is one of the most significant elements of the process. You can use the seed list to know how sent messages will react in your subscribers’ mailboxes.
What is a seed list?
A seed list is a small set of email addresses to which you will send a campaign for testing purposes before blasting it to all of your subscribers. It will allow you to see how your email performs in the inboxes of your recipients and on different browsers.
Furthermore, you may use the seed list to track inbox placement and observe the deliverability ratio across various mailing platforms while monitoring your email campaign, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, etc. The list can help you understand whether your campaign email is about to go to your client’s promotion or spam folder or directly into their inbox.
Goals of seed listing
The goals of seed listing are pretty specific to
- Deliver your entire effort for your new campaign with a successful result to the receiver’s inbox.
- Place your email directly in the primary section of the receiver’s inbox.
- Increase both the open email rate and the click rate.
- Catch the full attention of your target audience with proper planning.
- Find out more new strategies after running the seed test successfully.
Email authentication before the seed list
As an email marketer, you may have spent tons of time making an effective email for your targeted audience. But without the proper authenticity of your email, every further step will be difficult, even seed listing. Otherwise, you’ll waste your email marketing efforts if your emails go into your subscribers’ spam folders. As a marketer, you must prove to the receiver’s ISP that your marketing emails are authentic. That’s why you have to monitor the email authentication process. That’s why you have to watch the email authentication process. Here are those steps:
- You should use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC email authentication methods to prove to the ISPs and mail services that you, as a sender, are trustworthy.
- Your email address username (before the domain name) and your profile/brand name for that email should be the same and professional.
You can choose an email tester tool that can help check your email score and increase the possibility of enhancing your email authenticity. Moreover, you should check out this blog to learn about the step-by-step email authentication process.
Efficient implementation of the seed list
As mentioned before, seed listing is a test step to see if your email is delivered correctly, avoiding issues. But you should not send your test email to everyone commonly. Without having a proper email seed list with your familiar persons, you will fail to get an accurate email delivery rate, or even receivers may report your mail. For example, attaching a link to your email must open correctly on the receiver’s end.
Stage A: Gather some email addresses of friends or family members for your seed list. They are well-known to you, so it will be less of a hassle.
Stage B: After running the seed test successfully, you will get a measurable ratio of how your future email campaign will behave in customers’ inboxes. By implementing your listed subscriber segmentation technique, you can increase the open email rate, and the click-through rate will also increase. You can also gain consumer trust and rapidly improve your brand recognition and reputation.
Along with the seed listing process, you must consider three more factors to boost your plan, which are as follows:
- Email list validation.
- A/B testing.
- Email deliverability ratio.
Email list validation
Before rolling out a campaign to your full email list, running a list validation test is always better to reduce the email bounce rate. The email validation process will help you cut off invalid email addresses. You can use an email validator tool to simplify the process. The email validator tool will scan your email list and help you avoid sending campaigns to any non-existent email addresses. As a result, with the assistance of the email validator tool, you can reduce the email bounce chance and improve the email deliverability ratio. After this step, you can proceed to the seed listing process.
A/B testing after the seed list
A/B testing or split testing is a very well-known method for email marketers. One can differentiate between two or more variations of one campaign to understand which variation is effective. If you have already followed or prepared to follow the seed listing process so far, now it’s time for A/B testing. It will assist you in making the right decision while sending the email to your seed list. The cons of not running the A/B testing are pretty straightforward, such as:
- A/B testing is an excellent time-efficient strategy.
- Without A/B testing, you can’t get a clear, evidence-based, and effective result to pick which of your campaign versions will be perfect for email marketing.
- A/B testing can allow you to test any of your new email campaign ideas to know whether they are good or bad.
- Without A/B testing, you will miss out on a cheap pricing facility and welcome heavy workloads. Many email marketing tools provide built-in A/B testing features, such as MailBluster, Mailchimp, Moosend, and MailerLite.
Impact of seed list on email deliverability ratio
Now you have a clear concept of the whole seed listing procedure. As a marketer, you are constantly concerned with successful email delivery. For various reasons, emails end up in spam folders, lowering delivery rates. Increasing spam will convert a user’s entire mail database into a trash folder, causing them to miss out on important emails. Let’s focus on the solution rather than the cause of the problem. But the genuine concern is the complexity and time-consuming the entire process can be if done manually.
Conclusion
Indeed, sorting out a seed list before starting an effective email marketing campaign is necessary. A seed list can greatly help you with the process of developing your email marketing strategy. But be careful not to allow your emails to end up in spam, which makes all your efforts pointless. So, always try to prevent your email from going to spam. Furthermore, to take your overall email marketing effort one step further, you may visit this blog and learn about the current trends regarding email marketing. Those email marketing solutions can act as your most effective professional coach.
Contents
