Email Marketing New Year’s Resolutions

It’s that time of year.  It seems like each January brings another opportunity to reflect on each of our client’s Email Marketing performance from the past year and how we improve it for the next.  While email trends and usage change, one thing seems to remain the same. We always want our email lists to grow and perform as well or better than the year before.

One of the hardest things to consider, but possibly the most valuable is the engagement level of your weakest subscribers.

• Do they want to continue to be part of the conversation?
• Should we remove them from our active subscriber list?
• Is less more?

Yes, less can be more.  This month I am reflecting back on an email program that embraced this very concept.  Gold Star Chili recognized the waning list performance and engagement of their largest audience, eClub. There was a number of Fans that stopped clicking in the emails, weren’t sharing any content and frankly weren’t even opening the emails.  It was tough to recommend removing 20-25% of their email audience; that’s a lot of impressions and awareness.  18 months later, they now enjoy very healthy email open rates, better engagement all around, and a list that’s just about the same size.  In addition to improved engagement, they also benefit in 99% deliverability scores.

Here are a few things we considered when we planned to clean out their email list:

• Segment out your subscribers who aren’t meeting your goals.  (opens, clicks, etc)
• Build a series of emails letting your subscribers know what you’re doing.  Invite them to stay engaged, ask for feedback and offer them an incentive to stick around if that makes sense.
• Be sure that it’s very easy for them to re-activate their subscription.  Keep it simple, easy and rewarding.
• Continue to do this throughout the year.  Determine a time period that makes sense for your audience and automate this campaign if possible.
• Subscriber Rule.  Deliver timely, relevant, anticipated content to keep the conversation going.