Shrink Your House Email List and Increase Your Results - What?

Subscribing to an email list is easy-so easy in fact, it leads some subscribers to request emails in which they have only a passing interest. As time goes by, that half-hearted interest can dwindle and become non-existent.

The Impact of "Dead Weight Subscribers" on Your Email Performance

Many marketers work hard to build larger mailing lists, but by doing so they can adversely affect the very data used to reflect campaign success. Current research has shown Conversion Rate, Open Rate and Click-through Rate to be the metrics most used by marketers when assessing email performance.

1. "Dead weight subscribers" who receive, but rarely or never engage with your emails, have a negative impact on these key metrics simply by remaining on your recipient list.
2.  They also make it more difficult to accurately test the success of different email strategies (e.g. subject line testing), as these types of subscribers can skew your results.

These subscribers will eventually tire of deleting your emails without opening them, and may inaccurately mark your message as SPAM even though they opted-in to your list. The easily-accessible "Report as SPAM" tools on popular email clients can be viewed as more convenient than the unsubscribe process, and uninterested recipients are more likely than anyone to take this path of least resistance-which can harm your reputation as a sender. 

A smaller list made up of actively engaged subscribers should deliver improved email metrics, and can be attained without taking the ultimate step of deleting addresses.

Steps to Take Before Deleting

1.  Send an open-ended survey to your subscribers who have not opened and/or clicked a link within an email in the past six months, asking for feedback as to what content they would like to see in future emails. Make sure the subject line (e.g., "Help Improve Our Newsletter") makes it clear this is not just another typical email communication to these subscribers; this will help produce greater feedback.

 Not only will this feedback provide valuable insight into areas where your emails may be lacking, but being spoken to directly can re-engage these subscribers with your email. If certain subscribers continue to show no response to your emails even after special effort has been made to target them, it is likely they have no interest in receiving further communications, and they can be removed with no regrets.

2.  Another less permanent approach would be to filter the email addresses of all dead weight subscribers into a separate list. This way, the overall number of subscribers stays the same and the same content can be delivered to all subscribers, but the segmented list of dead weight subscribers will have its metrics reported separately from the main list. You can also leverage this separation to test various tactics to increase engagement with these subscribers, such as differing subject lines and offers.

Comments

[Skip O'Neill]

Spot on. Also, leveraging some A/B testing can help with getting your unengaged subscribers re-engaged.