The Most Important Thing To Do Right Now
What is the most important thing you can do right now that will:
- Clean up your email database
- Increase future email open rates
- Increase future email click rates
- Decrease future deployment costs
- Make you look like an email rock star to your boss
An email engagement audit, of course!
What is that? Well, it’s when you query or look up your subscribers and see who has NOT opened OR clicked on at least one email from you in the last six months (or 180 days) or beyond and put those into a bucket for further analysis. Some of those email addresses might be:
- Invalid or not deliverable
- Good but your emails are landing in spam/junk folders because your email service provider (ESP) is not using an authentication domain and therefore emails go unseen
- Mentally opted out from your emails and either let them sit in their inbox unread or delete them without opening
The top two bullets are fixable, in your control and should be tackled first. The last bullet makes up the majority of your subscriber database dead weight where you can deploy a re-engagement or permission drip email series of 1-3 emails to try to get them to give you permission on receiving future emails by saying “yes or no.” Anyone who says no or doesn’t respond gets purged.
I know, I know … sounds like work and the boss doesn’t want to shrink the number of subscribers you have. But what if I told you that the dead weight of your subscriber count actually works against you, and if you don’t act by the June/July to win back unengaged subscribers you’re digging a deeper hole that will be challenging to get out of?
Q3 sets you up for the best or worst chances of reaching an inbox in Q4. The Q4 curse punishes those with bad email marketing practices, so it is very difficult to get inboxed for back to school, back to work and holiday email deployments. It’s the cyclical process of algorithms, engagement and ESPs dealing with fluctuating email volumes hitting their servers. It’s not personal. It’s email business.
The good news is, if you purge email dead weight now, you will be in good shape for late Q3 and Q4. Then continue to go with the flow.
Q1 Learn | AB Split Test
Q2 Spring Clean | Engage | Excite
Q3 Permission | Win-Back
Q4 Segment | Suppress Non-Engaged
Doing the audit will be an eye-opening experience for you if you’ve never done one before and a little bit of a blow to your ego when you see what percentage of your database isn’t opening the emails you worked so hard to get out there. It will all be fine if you take action. And if you need any help taking action, let’s talk.
