You know how much your audience loves receiving emails from your brand. You’ve seen their open and response rates. You know how many of them are on Gmail or another email client. But what does all that information really tell you?
To test the viability of a new email campaign, marketers often use so-called “seed lists”—short lists of people who have previously shown interest in receiving more content from your brand. These lists can come from several sources: capturing leads during events or webinars, adding prospects who signed up for your blog newsletter, even scraping contact details from website user profiles.
What Is a Seed List?
A seed list is a list of people you plan to send an email campaign to. The ideal seed list is a list of recipients who represent your best potential customers. Ideally, this means you have their names, email addresses, and some kind of demographic information. If you don’t have the last two, that’s okay. When you’re creating a seed list, you’re trying to find people who are similar to your best customers. The exact process of creating a seed list will vary based on the tools you’re using. Some marketing automation systems, like HubSpot, are designed to help you create and manage seed lists from the get-go. Other email deliverability platforms such as MailMonitor.com offer ready to use seed lists that allow you to track and monitor your campaign results before you send the campaign to your real contacts.
What Is Seed List Weighting and Why Is It Important?
Seed list weighting is the process of weighting (or assigning a value to) the contacts on a seed list so that a marketing automation or email marketing tool can determine which contacts to send emails to first.
Seed list weighting is important because it allows marketers to test out the response rates and open rates of their email campaigns with an audience similar to their own contact list. With the proper seed list weighting, you can make successful email campaigns. This is especially true if you’re using contact data that you scraped off websites or other sources that may not include demographic information.
Why Do I Need to Create Seed Lists?
Since the best way to determine if a campaign will succeed is to send the campaign and see how it performs, it would seem that seed lists are unnecessary. In reality, though, your sender reputation can be damaged by deliverability problems with email. You may use your seed list to detect any spam or authentication filter issues that would cause even more deliverability difficulties if you sent emails to your entire list. You may also avoid sending improperly formatted or unpolished emails to your subscribers by using a seed list. You’ll save yourself a lot of embarrassment by doing so. In addition, your emails will have better quality and will provide value to your subscribers if you use a seed list.
For this reason, you need to create a seed list and use it to test out your email campaign before you send it to your entire list. This way, you can make sure your email campaign is as effective as possible before you hit “Send.”
Seed List Weighting with MailMonitor
When you weight your seed list, you can get an improved idea of your deliverability and inbox placement using a more accurate picture of where your campaign is really going. With MailMonitor, you can get a personalized seed list tailored around your mailing stream. Thanks to this, you can eliminate uncertainty about which ISPs are most important and where to allocate your resources.
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business, and it’s relatively easy to set up and manage. However, if you want your email campaigns to be as effective as possible, you need to create realistic seed lists. If you create seed lists that include contacts who are more interested in your brand than your best customers would be, you’ll get unrealistic results.
If you create seed lists that don’t include any contacts at all, you won’t be able to start any campaigns. As long as you’re careful about how you create your seed lists, you’ll be able to test out your email campaigns and make sure that each one is as effective as possible before you send it to your entire list.
