Protecting Your Investment by Maintianing Your Email List

Building your email marketing subscriber base is only the first challenge. Maintaining a clean, responsive, opt-in list of subscribers is the next hurdle. In my last post, I spoke about how to effectively grow your list. Now you need to understand how to make sure your list continues to remain effective and producing results.

As I mentioned in my last post, each year you can expect your list to erode up to 30% based on your subscribers changing their email address. This holds true regardless of whether your focus is on B2B or B2C. Bounce management will help you drastically reduce that rate.

If you are having challenges with your subscribers losing interest and effectively causing your list to become stale, check out how to turn that around by reading more about active vs. inactive subscribers.

BOUNCE MANAGEMENT
Most, if not all email marketing platforms provide tracking on the deliverability of your email sends. The report should give you a breakdown of which emails were delivered and which emails did not. In the simplest form, there are two reasons why an email was not delivered to your subscriber.

Soft Bounces - One general category for a bounced email is the soft bounce. This means that the email address is valid, however there was something that caused your email to not get through to the subscribers inbox. Examples of this type of bounce are the mailbox was full, the server was down, your email was blocked by a SPAM filter, and so on.

When you receive a soft bounce message several times consecutively (each platform has a different rule for this. The range can be anywhere from 3 – 5 times) on a subscribers email address, the platform you are using will most likely flag the email as undeliverable and it will be blocked from receiving additional emails.

You can stay on top of this erosion by reviewing this list every 3 to 6 months. Place a call to the subscriber notifying them of the issue and asking them, first of all if they are still interested in receiving your emails and secondly if they have added your marketing email address to their “Safe Senders” list. If you are using an email marketing platform that provides you with a detailed definition of the reason for the soft bounce, then you are able to more easily determine what needs to be done to solve the issue of your emails bouncing and if it is even worth placing that call.

For example, if the response you receive from a subscriber multiple times is “mailbox full” then it will not help to add your email address to their Safe Senders list. The message would be more along the lines of determining if the subscriber would like to use a different email address to receive your emails.

Hard Bounces - The other category is the basic hard bounce which means the email address is not valid. The exception to this definition is when an email browser or SPAM filter returns a “fake” hard bounce. Again, most email marketing platforms will either segment your hard bounced emails into a list, or just flag the emails as such and block them from being sent additional emails.

Staying on top of this list is a similar process, but can be done much more frequently and the conversation is always going to be the same. “We noticed that your email address has gone bad and we wanted to make sure you could still benefit from receiving our emails. Do you have a new emails address you would like us to send them to?” Update the record with the correct email address and get them back on the list.

ACTIVE vs. INACTIVE SUBSCRIBERS
The basic objective with every email marketing campaign whether it is for brand awareness or to drive sales is to always drive the subscriber to take some sort of action. This is the only way you are going to be able to measure success or failure of your campaigns… right? I would disagree. Subscribers will not always unsubscribe from your list when they are not interested in your emails anymore. They will just stop reading them. To determine how effect your email marketing efforts are over the long run, you need to factor in how “inactive” your subscribers have become.

Define what active subscriber means to you. For example, I will define active subscribers as subscribers who will at least open your emails and click on a link once every 3 months. Depending on the frequency of your messaging and the content you are sending, this definition could be greatly altered. So, find the right set of rules to determine what an active subscriber is for your purpose.

Once you have defined what an active subscriber is for you, everyone else is now considered inactive. For one reason or another, they have stopped interacting with your company. You have lost your relevancy with them, you have annoyed them with too many messages, you have done something, or not enough to keep them interacting with you.

So, what do you do with the email subscribers who have become inactive? At this point you are wasting your time blasting away at them hoping for some activity. Inactive subscribers need to be segmented and messaged to differently with a campaign focused on reengaging with them. Pulling the inactive subscriber out of your main campaigns on a regular basis will also give you much cleaner reporting.

You can learn just as much from your inactive subscribers as you could from your active subscribers. One way to accomplish this is to let the subscriber rest for a few cycles and then send them a survey. Your message needs to be focused on the importance of your relationship with the subscriber. Let them know that you miss them and offer them some incentive to complete the survey. The survey needs to give them the opportunity to tell you why they are not engaging and comment on what they would like to see or what would get them interested again. Give them options to change their preferences including the ability to receive less email from you… even the option to opt-out all together.

Just like staying on top of the oil changes and scheduled maintenance on your vehicle, setting rules around how to handle bounce management and inactive subscribers up front (and of course, following those rules) will help to protect your investment. It also does not hurt to get a nice coat of wax on it once and a while… so, let me know how I can help you add that extra shine to your campaigns with future posts.