"The biggest factors in improving deliverability, 64% said clean up-to-date lists, with relevance at 52% and sender reputation at 42%. - Econsultancy "Email Marketing Census 2011" (2011)"

At this point in the email marketing programme, you will have seen how planning a coherent strategy is essential in both providing guidance and aligning your campaigns with measureable company goals. Likewise the efforts that you have made segmenting your list and developing the appropriate content, design and layout will have ensured that the recipient is receiving relevant, desirable information. However all of this effort will be wasted if you don't devote the same care and attention to your list. You should consider this in two ways:

• List management is about focusing on current addresses. Nothing will do more damage to campaign ROI than an unclean list. As one marketer addressing the Marketing Sherpa 2011 Email Benchmark Survey puts it: "Removal of non-participating subscribers has had the most influence on improving deliverability and email performance rates in all aspects of email marketing. In other words, get rid of the deadbeat email addresses and everything improves, and the spam companies leave our email alone."

• List growth is about maximising the scalable potential of email, and therefore your email marketing campaigns. You should be looking to add new addresses to your list such that a successful campaign can be repeated at the touch of a button (using for example the "clone a campaign" feature in Sage E-marketing for Sage CRM).

In this series we will look at best-practice around both list management and list growth. You've taken the time, made the effort and spent the money on your strategy, segmentation best-practice and creative content - don't waste it all on poor list hygiene!