Spring clean your email subscriber list
‘Tis the season for spring cleaning and one area of cleanup in marketing is your email marketing efforts – especially your email subscriber lists. Now, I’m not recommending just deleting contacts or lists completely, this isn’t a purge situation! But, there are ways you can check your lists to see how engaged or active these contacts are and if they’re contacts you want to keep.
When we as marketers talk to sales or leadership, they’re often wary of deleting contacts because more contacts obviously means more opportunities for selling and closing, right? Right?! I can practically hear the desperation from here.
But there is some truth to that, these contacts at one time did want your information and your emails – as long as you didn’t commit a sin against email marketing by buying your lists – and you do have the opportunity to re-engage them. If they don’t take the bait, then it’s time to remove them from your lists as they’re not providing any sort of return.
Ready to find out who’s still paying attention to your emails or whose attention you can get back? Let’s discuss email re-engagement tactics!
4 steps to a successful re-engagement email campaign
1. Find the contacts that have zoned out
The first step in spring cleaning your email lists is to identify those who are not engaging with anything you send. Now, keep in mind there could be a number of reasons they’ve stopped engaging. Perhaps that email address is no longer valid as they’ve left the company (in a B2B space) or they changed their email address and didn’t opt-in to your emails with the new one.
You most likely won’t know the reason they’ve zoned out and haven’t shown interest in your emails but you do need to know who these people are. Most email programs allow you to segment your contacts by email actions and you should be able to create a list of subscribers that haven’t opened any of your emails in the last six or twelve months.
2. Ask if they’re still interested
I guarantee you everyone has gotten one of these emails, even you! These are the emails that come along and have a subject line like, “Still interested, Stephanie?” or “Are we still friends?” or the emotional “What did we do wrong?” that might as well play a womp, womp sound when I open it.
These reconfirmation emails are designed to capture people’s attention and trigger a response, whether that’s to confirm that they’re still interested or put the ball in their court to unsubscribe. While the second option isn’t ideal, at least it’s an answer.
If you want to up the ante by making this email more engaging, offer a discount or promotion, ask them to provide feedback on what your brand can do better or could have done to get their business, or bust out your tiny violin and play a sad song about how you’ll miss having them on your email list.
They say you only get one chance to make a first impression but since you’re basically re-introducing yourself, go all out with this email in case it’s the last impression you make.
3. Analyze the results
After you’ve sent out the email, keep a close eye on its performance. Are people saying they’re still interested? Excellent, good job! Now you have to come up with a follow-up campaign to keep them engaged moving forward.
Are people not opening it? That’s okay too. It’s good to say goodbye to these subscribers as they’re actively disinterested in your content at this point.
I always present deleting these contacts to sales the same way I do social media. Numbers are a good way to measure our efforts and the bigger audience we have, the more people we can reach. But we shouldn’t be wasting our time, money, and creative efforts on a big audience of people who don’t care. We want to focus on email subscribers that are opening, clicking, and engaging with our emails.
Also, by removing these inactive subscribers, we’ll generally see better performance among future campaigns and we’ll have a more accurate picture of what kind of email content people want.
4. Review email campaigns and content
Go back and look at the campaigns these unengaged subscribers were getting. Can you identify any weak or irrelevant content? Can you follow their journey and see if the story you’re telling makes sense and is valuable to them? Are you emailing them too much or too little after they sign up?
You could have the best email design ever and your content can still flop. Take the time to review what you’re sending these subscribers and seeing what content works, what didn’t, and how you can improve. Maybe that’s revising a welcome series or creating a whole new nurture stream in-between existing ones.
Your emails can only perform as well as the content you send them (I suppose a strong subject line helps too).
This time of year is perfect for testing out a re-engagement campaign and cleaning up your email subscriber list for the summer. Follow these steps and you might find yourself moving a few contacts from an inactive list to a happily engaged list.
How do you manage email re-engagement campaigns and cleaning your subscriber lists? Tell me in the comments below!
