Not happy with the results of your house list email marketing campaigns? The problem might not be with your content but instead with your list. Many of you probably spend time analyzing email metrics like opens, clicks, conversions, unsubscribes etc. but what about inactivity? What about those subscribers who do nothing? The disengaged, bored and tired.
List fatigue happens when subscribers no longer respond to your messages. Its not that they don't click on your messages, they don't open them, not even to unsubscribe, they just ignore them. These do-nothing subscribers are bringing your campaigns down and you're watering down your metrics and jeopardizing your reputation by ignoring them–not to mention missing opportunities to reengage them.
If you send mail to inactive subscribers you put your emailing reputation ability to deliver emails at risk. ISPs often turn old email addresses no longer in use into to traps called "honeypots" to see which email marketers continue to send to invalid email addresses as a means to identify spammers. Additionally, ISPs also monitor the number of bounces email marketers generate and once you reach a certain threshold your emails won't be delivered.
In addition to protecting your reputation, removing inactive subscribers helps improve the accuracy of the results of your email marketing campaigns, lowers the cost of each deployment and ultimately increases ROI. If you send a message to 10,000 subscribers but only 8,000 are active, you're not only paying to send messages to 2,000 people that won't read them, you're skewing your metrics because every email metric is measured against the number of messages delivered. If 10,000 messages are sent and only 4500 open them your open rate is 45%. However, if you send 8000 messages and 4500 are opened your open rate is 56% and its more accurate because you are measuring response from your engaged subscribers and not watering it down by measuring response from subscribers who will never respond.
So what do you do? Define a strategy for identifying inactive subscribers and develop a campaign to get those subscribers reengaged. Monitor and ferret out those who do not respond and remove them from your list.
Remember its not the size of the list that counts. Its how well you work it.
Dave Cannon, Director, Interactive Services
