How To Lower Your Marketing Costs With Creative Email List Management
Email marketing lists are practically the lifeblood of your company. If all goes well they grow over time with a group of engaged followers.
However, those are the key words – “engaged followers”
Not all followers are engaged. Actually according to the Huffington Post 70-75% of email marketing lists are inactive. That means if your email list contains, for example 5,000 subscribers, then approximately 3,500 are inactive.
It probably doesn’t come as any shock to you, but you need to do something about this. It’s costing you unnecessarily, and throwing off your analytics too.
To reduce these costs and get more accurate analytics, you need to apply a few serious email list management techniques to your inactive subscribers. I’ll show you how (or at least Ami will demonstrate), but first…
The Email List Management Rationale
Let’s just look at your subscriber list in slightly different terms. Many marketers rely on the ESV method to calculate the value of their subscribers. Implanted in this method is the cost of email hosting services, message delivery costs, and the time to derive value from each subscriber. Everyone will formulate different values and costs with their subscribers.
Once you understand your subscriber value and costs, you’ll be taking immediate action to remove ALL inactive subscribers on your list.
In other words – Immediate Email List Management!
Your Takeaway’s – Manage Your Email List
- Don’t sweat the unsubscribers. Pay attention to the inactive subscribers. It’s the inactive guys that cost you you mulla.
- Focus on how to get your subscribers more activated with your brand and content.
- Find out who’s not engaged (aka inactive). If you are using Aweber, Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, Constant Contact, iContact, or any other major email list provider, a few keystrokes will give you the results you need.
- Ami uses 6 months as her indicator for inactivity. Use what’s good for you. Produce the “No Open” list.
- Send an email to the segment who are inactive, with a subject line that is similar to “Open this email if you ever want to hear from me again”. I know it sounds strong and forceful, but remember you are sending it to those who have not opened up your email, say in 6 months. The body of the email could be “Hey, you haven’t really been engaged with me lately, but now that you’ve open this email you’ll carry on receiving future emails from me. However, if you are not that connected to me content I invite you to unsubscribe”. Again forceful, but you’re not being rude. You are just trying to get rid of those that are clogging everything up. The net effect with this is that those that open will be spared for one more cycle, but as soon as you run the same campaign a few days later you will see who has not opened this email.
- For those that do not open the campaign email, UNSUBSCRIBE them NOW.
- By going through this simple process you will firstly lower your per cost per each subscriber and get a more accurate reading on your engagement rates.
- Furthermore, you should incorporate this list cleaning task into your regular monthly housekeeping tasks.
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