A basic requirement for a cold email campaign to be successful is ensuring your emails actually make it to the inbox of your prospects. One important tool for confirming deliverability of marketing emails is a seed list.
In this article we’ll cover:
Let’s get into it!
A seed list is a short list of emails to test the deliverability of your email design content. Seed lists are usually made up of a few email addresses of people that you personally know. This can be your business associates, employees, friends, family or co-workers.
The main purpose of the seed test list is to analyze the deliverability of your email content. Have the people on the seed list check to ensure the email is in the inbox and not in the spam folder. Also confirming that the visual design aspects you embed will display correctly and are effective. This may even include feedback that helps you decide on the best font size to use for your email marketing campaign, select better images and more. Additionally, seed lists can help validate that product links you insert are functioning and clicks are being tracked accurately.
Your seed list and your regular email list serve two different functions. The seed list is used for internal verification of deliverability. On the other hand, the regular email list is sent to your subscribers in search of warm leads.
Seed lists can help you observe any errors or flaws your content contains before you actually send a deficient email to your prospects. This will help avoid burning out your regular email list of prospects with emails that do not display correctly, compromising your messaging. Avoid sending these flawed emails to improve the results of your email marketing strategy.
Along with making sure your email content is optimized for deliverability, using a seed list can also preserve your sender reputation. This means recipients of your regular email list will not become overwhelmed or annoyed from you sending emails too frequently. Sending too many emails can result in the recipients ignoring your emails or even blocking your email address. This means anything you send to them will end up unopened, decreasing the effectiveness of your sales email campaign efforts.
Of course seed lists are not perfect and there are limitations and challenges in using this technique to measure deliverability of your sales email content. For instance, the people in your seed list may not use all of the various email service providers, ISPs and email clients. This means you will not be able to verify the rest of the common service providers.
Although seed lists are effective in verifying basic functionality, such as design, deliverability and functioning links, seed lists usually do not accurately model average user engagement and interaction behavior. For example, those on your regular email list have probably subscribed through various avenues, such as guest blogs, articles, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, direct messages or various other social media marketing. These types of users may have different interaction behavior than the people you personally know on your seed list.
The following are some things to keep in mind when building and managing a seed list:
Creating an effective seed list does take considerable thought and should not be randomized. Take into consideration the people you are adding to the seed list and make sure they are those who are most capable of giving you the most useful feedback. The diverse qualities you are looking for will depend on your business and what types of products or services you are offering.
Before you start building your seed list you need to take a step back and determine what the goals of your sales email campaign are.
Determining your objectives will help you decide what is included in your sales email campaign in order to increase opens and clicks on your reports. This will maximize lead generation, ultimately leading to increased sales revenue.
Various email address domains will filter and display email content differently. This includes text, images, logos and links. Therefore, you will want your seed list to have a mix of email account domains.
Along with internal email address domains, which are the same as the email you are sending from, you will want various external email domains to be a part of the seed list. Internal email domains are more likely to have the email delivered properly, while external email domains can have varying results which you will want to be aware of in measuring deliverability of your campaign. You may even want to consider creating your own email addresses with various domains to add to the seed list so you can test for yourself the deliverability of your email campaign for different domains.
There are a variety of specialized email marketing tools and platforms email marketers can use for sending emails once you have created your seed list. Some of these tools, such as BookYourData, provide email authentication capabilities. In fact, BookYourData is known as the first in the industry to offer 97% accuracy guaranteed for email clients on B2B email campaigns. BookYouData is considered one of the top 5 cold email software in the industry.
Building your email list organically means obtaining new emails from direct signups from people who voluntarily express interest in receiving the email. Although building this type of email list is slower than purchasing email lists it is usually more effective with higher open rates, deliverability and email marketing conversion rates.
Of course, when it comes to your seed list, building the list organically is really the only way to go. You do not want to send the seed list to random people who have not agreed to help you monitor the deliverability of your email content. That would defeat the whole purpose of a seed list.
On the other hand, when it comes to your regular email marketing list you have a bit more latitude. Organically building your list is still generally superior but you may also consider buying targeted email lists.
The objective of your seed list is to gauge the deliverability of your sales email content when you eventually send the email campaign to your regular email list of individuals, companies and prospects. Therefore, be sure to model the seed list to as closely resemble your regular email list as possible. For example, if your regular email list is made up of 75% Gmail addresses, your seed list should be as consistent to this proportion as possible. Although building your list organically is preferred, if you are purchasing a list be sure to do your research and only buy from the best B2B email list providers.
Send to your seed list on a regular basis in order to gain adequate data regarding deliverability. Also, try to send emails to the seed list at the same intervals as you are planning to send to your regular email list. Additionally, do not include your seed list test metrics as part of your overall marketing performance diagnostic.
Finally, be sure to regularly update your seed list to ensure the list remains relevant to your marketing and sales campaign.
Seed lists are an integral part of making money with an email marketing campaign regardless of what product or service you are selling. This is why it is essential you understand how to best leverage your seed list to enhance the deliverability of your sales emails which will result in improved lead generation and increased sales.
The main objective of a email seed list is testing deliverability of your email content. This enables you to make necessary changes to your content to optimize chances of reaching the inboxes of prospects. The feedback you receive from seed list recipients and tracking of analytical tools, such as BookYourData will allow you to determine what changes are needed for optimization of your email campaign performance.
Seed lists allow you to identify potential problems with your email content which is causing your emails to go into your spam folders. Without using a seed list and going straight to sending to your regular email list, you will not have the opportunity to fix these issues in your email template, therefore causing some of your emails to not reach inboxes of prospects and potential customers. This will result in deliverability ratios that are lower than they should be.
Although engagement with your email content is difficult to measure through seed list tests, the seed list will enable you to better overcome the first obstacle you need to deal with before a prospect has the opportunity to engage. Of course, this first obstacle is reaching the prospect’s inbox. Having your email go to the spam folder will almost ensure that your email will not even be seen and certainly not opened. The higher your average open rate for marketing emails, the more engagement you will receive.
Those on your seed list can also provide you with feedback on the content of your email. You can use these insights and information to improve the content in order to make it more interesting to prospects which can increase engagement. Your analysis should also include HTML, CSS and other web coding elements which you can alter to improve results.
After learning the basics of using seed lists, you are ready to learn about more advanced techniques that experts use to enhance sales email campaign results.
Creating a custom seed list can be a game-changer for your email campaigns. A custom seed list is a list of hand-picked recipients who you trust that can and will provide you with the best feedback. However, this means you will need a comprehensive understanding of your target demographic in order to compile a seed list to accurately fit the target market.
On the other hand, this tactic will require a significant amount of time and effort which could be taking away from other tasks related to running your business. Therefore, you should take this into consideration before moving forward with creating any type of highly-customized seed list.
Although sending seed emails manually will get the job done, it can also be quite time-consuming. In order to save time you may want to send your seed emails through an automated email platform such as the BookYourData software which offers real-time email verification with an impressive 97% accuracy rate for email verification.
Another technique that can improve workflow is using segmentation features in your email platform software. This allows you to segment your seed emails from your regular email list, allowing you to send the test email to only those addresses. This helps to better integrate seed list testing into your overall marketing operations.
It is important to utilize seed lists in combination with other cold email outreach techniques for a comprehensive and effective sales strategy. This will maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.
Now that you are familiar with how email seed lists work and how they can enhance your sales campaign efforts, here are some key takeaways.
Once you have compiled a seed list that models accruately your target market, be sure to continually update your seed list. This means making necessary changes to your seed list demographics as your target market fluctuates. It is also important to get rid of email addresses of recipients who are no longer willing to help out and then replacing them with recipients who do want to provide feedback for you. Also be sure to look into available free email list providers out there.
It is essential to take the necessary steps to integrate best practices for effective seed list management. One cannot emphasize enough the importance of accurately modeling your target demographic when creating your seed list. Also, be sure that the makeup of various email domains resembles closely your regular email marketing list.
Additionally, you should utilize effective email marketing platforms such as BookYourData which guarantees a 97% accuracy rate in real-time email verification. This will help ensure that you are cold emailing correctly and effectively. BookYourData, even offers you 10 free leads just to get started.
Register with BookYourData immediately and start taking your email sales campaigns to the next level.
Updating your seed list on a regular basis is important to ensure you are accurately modeling your regular email list as well as adapting to new trends. Do this at least once per quarter.
It is not possible to guarantee 100% email deliverability with any type of email sales strategy, including seed lists. However, seed lists can increase increase deliverability considerably.
Each email service provider (ESP) will have their own spam filters which interact differently with your email content. This means seed list metrics from each email provider will be different.
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