Cleaning out the deadwood from your list
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on April 10, 2007
One of the simplest targeting measures you can take is to divide your list into active and non-active parts.Those in the active part are those where your outgoing emails register an open or click.
The non-active folk are those where you never get an open or click from them. Here you have to decide which timeframe to use (no clicks in 1 month? 2 months? 6 months?)
The idea is you can then write specific emails aimed at getting the non-actives to become active (for example through a special offer.) If they remain inactive you quietly unsubscribe them: there's no point in sending email someone isn't reading.
Melinda Krueger has some useful thoughts on how to approach this whole list cleaning and segmentation exercise here.
I'd especially echo her warning to take care when unilaterally deciding to remove someone from your mailing list. For example, people getting text-only versions of your emails will never register an open because of the measurement techniques used (see here for info on open rate measurements.)
She also mentions how some people may respond to an email even though they've ignored numerous previous messages. So they are paying attention after all.
I've noticed that myself. When I moved list hosts recently, I only transferred those addresses that had opened or clicked on a message in the last 3 months. But I continued to email the remainder of the list through the old system while I prevaricated about what to do with them.
Surprisingly, the old list of non-responders generated clicks. In other words, some people who hadn't opened or clicked on an email for over 3 months were still reading the emails. So it pays to be circumspect about dumping non-responders.
More on list hygiene | Tags: email marketing, list hygiene, email segmentation
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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