Last week we covered the basics of list acquisition and the tricks you need to know to get engaging and trusting subscribers right from the start. But your work does not stop there, it’s only beginning.I’m still going to repeat myself, but you can’t be an email marketer without a list, and you can’t be a good email marketer without a good list. Starting off with good subscription practices is a great thing and can get you a top quality list, but you have to remember that in order for it to stay that way you also have to look after it.
From my point of view, while working in Compliance Department, list hygiene almost seemed like some kind of a mystical topic. It was rarely brought up by our customers, and when we brought it up they were often surprised that this is even a thing. We also did have a couple of customers that took the effort of looking after their list and it was always reflected in their results.
To this day I feel that list hygiene is one of the most underappreciated areas in email marketing. There is still a false belief that your list size determines its value, despite the numerous campaign showing that it’s the engagement metrics that actually matter. Following a simple example, I think you’ll all agree that having a list with 20,000 contacts with an average of 15,000 opens each send is a lot better than 100,000 list with an average of 2,000 opens.
Even the best list loses it’s value over time if not handled correctly, and the example above can easily be a list of the same email marketer, just over different periods of time.
Before we get into practical things I want to highlight one more thing – I will not be focusing on reengagement as this will be part of my next post (so keep out for it next week), today we’ll concentrate solely on the removing/leaving an address on the list.
So what are the things that you can and should do to make sure that your list quality stays high? Let’s start with the basic again:
1. Do not force your subscribers to stay on the list
This is one of the main mistakes I see some email marketers do, trying to hide the unsubscribe link, or making the unsubscribe process complex to discourage their subscribers from leaving. I already witnessed a lot of examples like that and take it from me: if someone wants to leave your list he will find a way to do so, and the harder you’ll make it for his the harder he will want to get you back.
Let’s face it, people leave. They can become disinterested in what previously may have been their hobby and switch to something else, they may not have the need for your product anymore, or they could even say “I don’t care anymore” and go off to live in the mountains. Bottom line whatever the reason is – you will lose some of your subscribers and the best you can do is to respect their decision to leave.
I also do not want you to think that you can’t do anything in order to fight for this customer, it’s just that there is a good way and a bad way to go about it. You are not able to force a change of mind in anybody, and if you try the effects will most likely be opposite of what you anticipated (we were all kids once and I’m sure most of you remember how you felt when your parent forbid or ordered you to do something).
A simple unsubscribe confirmation page saying: “We are sorry to see you leave, but we respect that and wish you the best wherever you go. In the future if we will be able to assist you again please remember our site/email address/us and we will be honored to work with you again” will give off a better vibe than asking “are you sure?” for the n-th time during the unsubscribe process.
2. Get rid of the dead weight
The first point covers the case when your subscribers are still active and full of life. Now lets take a look at the other side of the coin. I’m talking about those subscribers that do not show any signs of life what so ever. The do not open your messages, they do not follow you links, they don’t do anything. Each list has at least a few of those subscribers.
First let’s look at what might have caused it. There are 2 most popular reason for subscribers inactivity: abandoned email address or your messages are filtered out by subscribers private setting. Please keep in mind that we are talking here about complete inactivity – they did not engage at all with any of your messages for the last year or so.
Bottom line is there is a great chance here that the message, even though is delivered to an email address, does not reach any living person. Keeping those addresses on your list becomes pointless as they only increase your list size without contributing to any potential gain. Quite the opposite, by artificially increasing your list size they generate additional cost needed to maintain and send to your list. A simple action of just removing those addresses can increase your income by simply decreasing the cost your list generates without influencing the revenue you get from your sends.
This action is also quite smart from the Deliverability point of view. For the last few years I’m observing a trend in which ISPs start focusing more and more attention on the engagement metrics alone, so even if you have low negative factors (like complaints or invalid emails), but your engagement is very low as well, they will still see you as a spammer.
Acting of those kind of emails however, in my opinion, means you are already behind and you should never allow for any email address to be inactive for so long. It’s more of a scenario that you should start with if you did nothing in regards of list hygiene for a long amount of time, so if you follow the instructions in my next point you should not worry about this one again.
3. Asking again is not a bad thing.
Reconfirmation is a hard topic to tackle. This is where I see the most friction in the Compliance and best practices vs marketing and revenue point of view. Still this is the best option to keep your list clean. Regular reconfirmation campaigns, if done correctly, will keep your list quality high with barely any influence on the revenue.
There is a lot of articles online talking about the reconfirmation campaigns and how they should be handled. Reading a lot of them in my time I always had the feeling that there is at least one thing that could be done better, but lets start from the top. So here are the points you need to remember when you plan every reconfirmation campaign:
- You can skip all active subscribers. Lets say you are doing reconfirmation campaigns every 3 months. There is no need for you to ask the permission from contacts that are already highly engaged in your mailings. They show they want to be on your list by that alone
- It’s nice to give some additional incent to stay on your list. Some kind of promotion, maybe a freebie, or whatever you think will work here. You can be creative just remember my advice from the previous post – If you promise something you have to follow through, period
- Respect choices and don’t asking again and again thinking they might have made the wrong decision. Trust your subscribers – they do know exactly what they are doing and if someone does not reconfirm, respect that
- Include an option to resubscribe. This is the think I wrote was missing, in my opinion, from most of the articles I read about the reconfirmation process. And it’s very simple, really. Right under the visible reconfirmation link add equally visible information how they can resubscribe to your list after they are removed.
One of the most common arguments against reconfirmation is that someone may not find the email before they are removed. This one action solves the issue completely. If someone is removed from your list though that they can be back on your list in no time, and they will be back when they are ready to read your emails again.
Following those few easy steps and keeping the reconfirmation campaigns frequent (every 3 to 6 months), will keep the quality of your list sky high for ages, which will be also visible in your deliverability.
Suppression lists
There is an additional thing I want to share my opinion on with you, suppression lists. They have its uses, but list quality should not be one of them. This is also something I saw a lot on the compliance side of things, usually in cases when it did not work.
Marketer’s idea here was: in stead of removing the contacts lets suppress them as they may still be useful in the future. This assumption is wrong from its very foundation. As soon as you acknowledge that an email address is inactive and should be removed thinking that it might be good one day in the future is simply contradicting yourself. The moment you stop sending to this email the “distance” between the 2 of you is increasing, and if later on you send an email, the effects are usually even worse.
Keeping those emails on the list “just suppressed” also gives room for a possible mistake. It’s enough that you forgot to include the suppression list in one send, getting yourself in trouble with the ISPs and Compliance Department of the company you work with. Eliminating the possibility of a mistake before it happens can save you a lot of headaches in the future (and this one you can apply to everything).
So there you have it! As mentioned in the beginning, next week we will discuss how to reengage inactive contacts and keep the engagement of the active ones high at all times and with this we’ll complete the list part of the cycle giving you complete set of information on one of the most important areas of email marketing so stay tuned.
Until then, share with us in the comments below how you keep your list crisp and fresh!
Taking Care of Your List Over Time: Deliverability Part III is a post from: GetResponse Blog - Email Marketing Tips
The post Taking Care of Your List Over Time: Deliverability Part III appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Email Marketing Tips.
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