Great email marketing is the result of testing and planning. For example, one should never send a campaign to an entire list unless one has tested to ensure deliverability, content, and design but this can happen on a micro, controlled level with a seed list. A seed list is an intentional set of email addresses used to determine whether or not an email looks how it should, operates how it should, and ends up where it’s supposed to be in an inbox or a spam folder. But regardless of whether you eventually acquire a seed list, good deliverability relies on a solid sender reputation. For instance, email warm-up services like Warmy.io assist you in your email sending reputation, increasing and maintaining your sender score to ensure your emails go to the same people over and over again. This post will explain how to create a seed list, why a seed list is important to test campaigns, and how an email warm-up service helps achieve the best deliverability rates.
Table of Contents
What Is a Seed List and Why Is It Important?
A seed list is an assortment of email addresses used to test an email marketing campaign before sending it out to the regular subscriber audience list. This assortment generally includes some people from the internal team, some trusted testers, and some email accounts from Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and beyond. The purpose of the seed list is to determine how the campaign functions in the real world. For example, broken links, faulty formatting, or the email ending up in a spam folder could derail the effectiveness of your campaign. One way to avoid such disasters is to test with a seed list to ensure the email looks like it’s operating effectively. A seed list will increase your campaign and troubleshoot any potential problems in advance that can jeopardize your success and tarnish your name.
Steps to Create a Seed List
Making a good seed list is a strategic process. Here’s how to build one:
Identify Your Testing Goals
How you start defining your seed list or asking what you want to test Are you most focused on deliverability, email rendering, or functionality? Test and refine the list but having testing goals is critical.
Choose a Varied Set of Addresses
Test using email addresses from different providers (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) to see how your email renders across platforms. Be sure to incorporate accounts with diverse engagement backgrounds (e.g. active and dormant users) to test deliverability in a range of contexts.
Add Internal and External Testers
Co-opt your team members in the seed list to check the content and design. To that end, also include external testers who will look at the email blindly to see if it performs properly and looks good.
As New Information Becomes Available, Update and Keep Your List
Your seed list can always change as your campaigns grow. So refresh your email accounts and invite new testers, and/or clean up your list. Maintaining your seed list with up to date information will represent current conditions and return accurate test results.
Making a seed list may help to demonstrate useful insights that help you for conducting an upcoming campaign.
Incorporating Seed Lists into Your Email Strategy
A seed list is not just a way to test. It’s part of your bigger email marketing campaign. The continual testing of seed lists allows you to learn deliverability and engagement patterns for better future campaigns. For example, constant testing over time with the seed list explains why certain subject lines get delivered more often than others or why certain CTA links and images are more engaged. This allows you to modify not just for that campaign but for your entire email copywriting ethos. Using seed lists as a component of your campaign process means every email goes to the same address under the same anticipated guidelines and an expectation like this can only strengthen your reputation for being professional.
Addressing Common Seed List Challenges
Yet seed lists can be somewhat unscrupulous if not done properly. For example, seed lists aren’t always diverse. If your seed list isn’t composed of many different email addresses from many different providers or devices, your results aren’t relative to your audience or to general results. In addition, sometimes companies do not resolve issues that are found from seed list testing. Just because you acknowledge there’s an issue isn’t enough; it needs to be resolved and re-tested to make sure it is resolved. But with the proper due diligence, this can be a great option for email segmentation testing.
Testing Campaigns with Your Seed List
Once your seed list is ready, the next step is to use it for testing your campaigns. Start by sending a test email to the addresses in your seed list. Pay close attention to the following aspects during the review process:
- Deliverability: Ensure that your emails are landing in inboxes rather than spam folders.
- Formatting: Check that the email renders correctly on different devices and email clients.
- Functionality: Test all links, CTAs, and dynamic elements to confirm they work as intended.
Use feedback from your seed list to refine your email design, content, and technical setup. Retest your campaign after making adjustments to confirm all issues have been resolved.
Why an Email Warm-Up Tool Is Crucial
Yet seed lists don’t solve deliverability issues, and planting someone in spam with the worst sender reputation happens no matter how well the copy is written or how stellar the graphic design is. So email warm-up services are essential. Warmy.io is an email warm-up service that grows and sustains your sender reputation, all done for you behind the scenes. As it gradually expands your sending capacity and simultaneously creates these organic interactions like opens and replies, it uses timestamps of the emails sent from and to the servers to show that this person’s email deserves to go to the inbox and not the junk folder. Warmy.io joins the picture in your campaign after it’s run through on a seed list. Where the seed list helps you correct any technical/design issues from a feasibility standpoint, Warmy.io addresses the overarching issue of your consistent deliverability to ensure your emails are being seen for sure. It’s the ideal fix.
Best Practices for Managing Your Seed List
A seed list is not static. It’s something you both compile and continuously adjust. Check your projections and current audiences to enhance the list’s performance. In addition, your seed list should contain people from different platforms and on different devices. Ultimately, everything obtained from the seeding should apply to the email campaigns in general. Use the seed to assess deliverability rates and audience open and engagement numbers, and apply any feedback from testers for better endeavors in the future. With Warmy.io, this ensures a successful email marketing campaign over and over again.
Conclusion
An email campaign requires a seed list in advance because marketers need to test the campaign before it goes live. A seed list is a tiny fraction of email addresses that help determine kinks before a large-scale send. For example, with a seed list as long as the email looks good on mobile, tablet, and desktop, all hyperlinks work and take readers to the proper destination, and dynamic fields appear correctly. Marketers will know there are no kinks if it’s sent successfully and accurately. But even with the best seed list warming, there’s no guarantee your email will land in the inbox every time.
Sadly, with many deliverability concerns, it’s a matter of a bad sender reputation meaning all those awesome marketing emails are going to spam. Enter Warmy.io. Warmy.io automatically warms up your email to sender status, generating your sender reputation over time through deliberate sends and artificial engagement. These artificial engagements alert ESPs that your email account is real and reliable, boosting the chances your email will arrive in the inbox through the roof. Using something like Warmy.io as an email warmup service only guarantees success, though, with seed list testing. Wherein your seed list lets you know if you have technical/content failures, Warmy.io acknowledges the global issue of not getting into the desired inbox. Thus, the two make up an even better email marketing puzzle piece and lessen the chances of you spinning your wheels on a campaign that ultimately won’t be seen.
The ability to seed and utilize Warmy.io in the process not only allows you to do it on your own, but it’s a real-life example of what’s achievable. You can feel comfortable and at ease tackling your next email campaign with less risk and more engagement rates – and thus, conversions. An email campaign that has been tested and is known to be deliverable will do far more good than one that hasn’t. Thus, efforts of seeding and efforts of warming up will protect from shortcomings of future attempts, ensuring your brand remains in good standing with its target audience and fostering long-term relationships.