When I talk to businesses about their email marketing I still quite often find them concerned about the list size rather than list quality. It's all very well having 10,000 'active' addresses on your list, but if it's the same 10% that opens each month then the reality is that 90% of your list is inactive.
I was reminded of this today when I read 'Google releases Gmail's priority inbox secrets' on eConsultancy. Basically Google has release information relating to how it prioritises messages in Gmail's Priority Inbox, by using 'certain features to decide what emails are important to the recipient'.
One of these criteria is social - looking at the total of email correspondance received from any particular sender, and comparing that to how often the recipient opens and clicks. So if you have people on your list who never open your emails, even if you suddenly go on a re-engagement mission the likelihood is that, as far as Gmail is concerned, the recipient won't want to see anything from you so your emails slip lower down the inbox.
What if your list doesn't contain many Gmail addresses - is there anything to be concerned about? Probably, yes - as pointed out in the eConsultancy article, Google is sharing this information with ISPs and if could well be that they and others adopt Google's criteria in the ongoing war against spam.
The second article that caught my eye was 'A Valentine's Message for Marketers: If You Love Your Customers, Let Them Go' at Advertising Age. Josh Bernoff makes an impassioned plea for marketers to cease and desist when it comes to making it hard to unsubscribe from email marketing.
You know the kind of thing - 'do not reply to this email as it is not monitored', forcing recipients to register or 'sign in' to a site if they want to unsub, stating 'please allow 28 days (for your unsub request to take effect)...'
I'm with Josh on this one. Doing everything you can to stop people from unsubscribing really sucks.
And culling your list, so it contains just the people who welcome your emails, is a pretty good idea. Unless you want to be mistaken for a spammer playing the numbers game.
Useful article: good stuff to quote at clients!
thank you. I generally wonder if the unsub difficulties (and being ignored when one does unsubscribe) are more the product of the email marketing companies than their clients (the supposed senders) as they try to hide the true paucity of their lists!
Thanks Rob, I agree that the problem is sometimes down to the system being used. In my experience the web-based email service providers have very strong list management tools and the facility for instant unsubscribe, whereas some inhouse systems are less flexible. If a company has invested in a CRM system then I can see how the ‘email module’ that comes with it is an attractive proposition. But add-on modules often lack the powerful features of the specialist email systems. Then again the ’28 days’ warning might just be a way of NOT unsubbing anyone and hoping you’ve forgotten that you’ve unsubbed (that’s happened to me a few times I think).
Nice post. Email marketing is a very important tool to everyone in the eCommerce business. Letting go of the subscribers is a very hard thing to do but letting go would be nicest thing to do if they want to, having them wait for 28 days is one of their delaying tactics for the subscribers to forget that they unsubbed.
It seems to had happened to all of us.
One of my clients was recently asked if she wanted to do a joint mailing to a list of 500k users. Sounds great… new customers, new sales, let’s get a special offer out.
But when we looked into it a little more, we found that the list was started 5 years ago, and hadn’t been actively used for a while. So very few of these addresses are going to be live, and very few of these people are going to open the emails. So it’s not nearly as attractive as we first thought.
Still going to do it though, but with much lower expectations.
Brad – thanks, yes, I can’t really see the logic of keeping customers in a stranglehold, as if that was really going to make them buy.
Julia – hmm, interesting… if the list is that poor, it doesn’t sound like a great idea, especially if it’s a consumer list, as there’s the question of whether they have ‘opted in’.I can see why it’s tempting, but I do feel that mailing to these large lists on a ‘spray and pray’ basis only adds to the spam problem.