Best Practices In Strategic Email Marketing September 2006

Strategy
Re-engaging Inactive Customers
By Geoff Linton

If you're a typical email marketer, as much as 50% of the subscribers on your list haven't clicked on a single link in months (check it out). This means you have no idea whether sending to them is helping your cause, hurting it or having no impact at all. It's tempting to do nothing, since getting that list built to its present proportions took lots of work. But if you tackle the problem analytically you will not only cease to annoy people who do not care to hear from you, but more actively engage those who do. Consider these five steps:

1. Make sure it isn't a delivery problem. The biggest cause of low opens and clicks today isn't unenthused subscribers, but uncooperative ISPs. As we have said in previous columns, email delivery gets tougher on a daily basis. Consider the Perilous Path of the Permission Email Message (below).

In the good old days the path led from your server right into the frontal lobes of your recipients (at least it felt that way). Today it is more circuitous. When the message leaves your server it will often bounce from the recipient's ISP to blacklist services that will first verify that you're not on them. If you're not, the message enters the ISP to be immediately scrutinized by a phalanx of spam filters judging if it looks, smells or behaves like spam. No presumption of innocence here. If it finally makes it to the Inbox your message has maybe a 50% chance of being opened, depending on a number of factors such as how compellingly you wrote the subject line. There are actually many more steps and obstacles to this process, but you get the idea.

What to do? Call people to see if they are receiving your emails. Make certain you're not on blacklists. Contact major ISPs to get yourself whitelisted. Subscribe to deliverability services like Return Path (expensive, but worth it). Run your emails through testing programs to see what combination of offer, creative and subject line yields better open rates.

Or, use the services of a dedicated email service provider like Inbox Marketer to do all this for you. It's our specialty.

2. Isolate the inactives. Once you've determined that people truly are ignoring your messages (as opposed to not receiving them), isolate these individuals as a separate group to more easily analyse and understand their behavior. An easy way to do this is to add a new field in your database that flags them as inactives. Even this group will have its sub-segments - i.e. people who don't open, people who open but don't click, etc.

3. Treat them differently. Dealing with inactives is recognizing that we are all different and respond to different things. The ideal is to send them what they are truly interested in, and there are several ways to determine this. One is to examine past click behavior. Chances are they evolved into non-clickers. Examine your log files of previous click activity, note what kinds of articles/offers intrigued them in the beginning and try to send more. This usually means investing in variable content and an email system that can dynamically personalize messages.

4. Acquire more information. Make it easy for subscribers to update their profiles. Best practice is to include a link on their email that will take them to their personalized preference center. Here they can update an email address, subscribe and unsubscribe to your various offerings and allow you to be more current. Another useful method is to append data to their profiles from any other databases you can access in order to learn everything you can about your inactive subscribers.

5. Engage early. Don't lose the momentum. The moment someone subscribes is the moment they are most receptive to you making an impression. At the very least, reply with a triggered response containing the most recent version of your newsletter. Then, continually test new subject lines and incentives to see what sparks attention.

Reactivation will never be 100% successful, but taking these steps now will mitigate the problem going forward.