I’ve been hearing a familiar refrain lately from the marketers that I work with: “My email response rates have been dropping.” If you’re singing that same tune, I have a some helpful ideas for you that I’ll be sharing over the next few weeks. Our first one: Do You See Dead People?
If your marketing database is more than one week old, you definitely have contacts that are no longer valid. In 2005 (ages ago!) Marketing Sherpa produced a chart that showed that database health declines by twenty-five percent each year. So if you started last year with 100,000 contacts, only 75,000 of those are still valid. Ouch. As those email addresses die off, they become dead weight in your marketing metrics. If your response rates have been slowly dropping over time, it is most likely a correlation to the natural aging of your database.
How can you address this? Split up your database! Ideally your marketing automation system should be able to help you understand who has been active in the last six months or so, and who hasn’t visited the website or opened an email during that time (inactive). Create two groups and send your next big email blast, such as a newsletter, to each group separately. Chances are that your response rates with the active group are still doing fine.
Now you have to get firm with that inactive group. Try a two touch re-engagement campaign specifically targeting those folks and for those that don’t re-engage, quarantine them in your database and stop sending to them. I know, I know… I can hear you freaking out right now. But trust me, you’re not really losing anything. In my next post on this topic we’ll talk about why these dead people are not just dragging down your response rates, they’re also hurting your deliverability reputation. Stay tuned….
[...] Your Email Reputation Precede You? In a series of continuing posts looking at email response rates, today’s topic is about your [...]
[...] Sense of Timing? In our quest for better email response rates we’ve looked at cleaning out inactive contacts as well as checking on your online reputation score. Today we’ll look at your follow-up times [...]
[...] Cleaning out inactive contacts [...]
[...] you call them inactive contacts, emotional unsubscribes or dead people – if you continue to market to contacts in your database who are ignoring your communications it [...]