Your list of contacts is at the heart of your marketing – whether they are your active customers or subscribers – without their up to date details you can’t market to them. You could have industry changing designs, and a strategy that leaves your competitors out in the cold. But without good quality data to distribute it to, it quickly becomes irrelevant.
The importance of your contacts is not lost on us, we understand you’ve probably spent years compiling your list. Investing time, energy and most likely money into harvesting contacts so naturally, you’re protective of it.
Imagine the suggestion is made that you need to cull and even unsubscribe your audience? Does the very idea horrify you? It may well do, but it’s one of those necessary activities that will have a positive impact further down the road.
As any avid gardener will tell you, you must prune your plants and trees to allow the new buds to blossom. It’s the same with email marketing, you need to cut out the disengaged so you can focus on a new set of contacts, ones that are wholeheartedly engaged with your brand and your message.
Why is list maintenance important?
Having the right recipients on your list is essential to help you achieve optimum results. While you might be hesitant to cull your contact list, to do so will improve how your campaigns perform.
To reassure you that culling contacts is not to be feared, MailNinja has identified the top 3 reasons for keeping on top of your contact lists:
- Protects and improves your sender reputation
- Makes targeting easier
- Brings down your sending costs
Protects your sender reputation
If you constantly send emails to those who are disengaged, you can cause damage to your sender reputation. With the way Email Service Providers (ESPs) are making improvements for users’ experience – they are taking note of the emails that they don’t pay attention to. If a recipient is no longer interested in your brand but they still receive your messages, it won’t take long for them to mark you as spam or worse, their email provider seeing that they don’t even open your email before either archiving or deleting it and trigging spam recognition algorithms. The more times you are reported as spam the less likely your emails will be delivered in general – meaning you won’t make it into the inboxes of those who are engaged.
Makes targeting easier
Only your best customers or subscribers deserve access to the best offers, you don’t want to blast your entire list with the same message, reward loyalty to increase conversions from those who are the most engaged with you.
Also, targeting those who haven’t opened one of your emails in six months (dependant on your customer life cycle) with a special reengagement campaign to incentivise them into action will identify those contacts you should consider unsubscribing – tell them that’s your plan and give them the opportunity to resubscribe if it gets to that. If they don’t engage at this point, then you have to accept they are not for you.
Brings down your sending costs
When you pay per subscriber you have to make sure you’ve only got the people who need to be there – if they haven’t purchased in XX years and haven’t engaged with a discount then will they ever? It’s time to say goodbye to those taking up space. Over the last 6 months we have helped a number of clients prune their lists and save between $1000 and $3000 a year each.
In summary
When it comes to your contacts it’s definitely about quality not quantity. What’s the point in having 100,000 contacts if 99,999 of them are not interested?
We’d recommend you give your list attention at least twice a year, depending on the frequency of your emails. There are automations and campaigns that can be set up to make sure you weed out the recipients not worth having on your list and if you’re baffled, let MailNinja help.
