News
7 Steps to Win
Back Unresponsive E-mail Contacts
By The Wise Marketer
Should you try to revive consumer relationships that
are failing because
e-mail has become undeliverable or unresponsive,
or should you simply drop them from future
campaigns?
According to e-mail delivery experts at
SubscriberMail, the most common answer is to drop
unresponsive addresses without further
investigation, mainly because it's considered too
big a task without sufficient rewards to try to
revive them.
Tough decisions. But when once-active recipients
have stopped opening your e-mails, or are no longer
reading your messages or clicking on links, there
may be ways of reviving them. So how can marketers
decide which ones can be revived?
According to Jordan Ayan, president for
SubscriberMail, "If you're seeing low activity from
recipients, it's time to determine if the addresses
can be saved or if they should be given the axe."
Seven steps for e-mail revival. The company
offers several pieces of sound advice to help
marketers determine whether or not inactive e-mail
recipients can actually be saved, or whether they
should be dropped:
1. Find out if they're really 'dead.' Many
recipients have images turned off by default, so
some recipients who are in fact reading your e-mails
may only appear dead because the opens are not
registered (if you're using embedded tracking image
URLs). To identify these recipients, start with a
simple "reactivate yourself" message. Select a group
that has not opened a message for six months and
send an e-mail with a message like this: "To ensure
you continue to receive our mailings, click here."
That click (which, of course, you track) verifies
both the address and more importantly the
recipients' interest. The link should take them to a
special offer or to a Web page where you might try
to gather more information if appropriate.
2. Build engagement with inactive recipients.
Try to revive the dead e-mail addresses that you
identified in the step above. The first thing to do
is identify the percentage of inactivity that is
acceptable in terms of your marketing goals.
Depending on your business model, someone who
responds once a quarter may be considered a good
prospect, while other marketers may consider three
months without any action to be a lost cause. So
you'll need to use existing active subscriber data
to determine your average range of activity, and use
that data to identify your lowest responders and
non-responders.
3. Analyze your attrition factors. Once
you've identified the group of recipients that
aren't responding as well as the average subscriber,
analyze the data you have gathered about them to
look for any similar characteristics. For example,
were these subscribers collected a specific number
of months or years ago, or did they come from a
certain acquisition source, or perhaps most were
acquired through a certain type of offer or
campaign? Finding the similarities may help to
explain their inactivity, and it will almost
certainly give you insight into what kind of
acquisition times, sources, and offers are least
effective. But more importantly, your analysis may
well help you to find out how to revive these
contacts. For example, if someone opted in because
of a 50%-off product offer, it is possible that that
could be re-engaged with another similar offer.
4. Build a reactivation plan. The key to
reactivation is to start testing different
approaches with small sub-sets of subscribers.
Determine if you want to treat low responders
differently from non-responders, and decide if you
want to take a multi-message approach or a quick
"single hit" approach. One option would be to send
an e-mail asking these groups if they would like to
continue receiving messages from you. If they still
don't respond, you can comfortably call them dead
and drop them from the list. Again, you might also
consider offering them a particular benefit or
special offer to take a more active interest in your
messages again.
5. Look out for insincere reactivations.
Continue to watch your low- and non-responders
carefully over time. Why? Well, one positive action
alone may not mean that a subscriber has fully
re-engaged with you, so you need to determine at
what point you can safely consider them revived and
add them back into your active marketing group. If
you encounter a lot of short-lived reactivations, it
may be time to plan a new win-back approach.
6. Be prepared to drop the worst of them. At
some point you will certainly have to accept the
fact that some of those addresses are truly dead and
cannot be revived or re-engaged. At that time, it is
most cost effective to drop them from your list
completely, and focus your energy and resources on
the remaining active subscribers.
7. Learn from mistakes and misjudgements.
While nobody likes to see their e-mail list decrease
in size, there is an opportunity to improve at the
same time. This is the time to examine the reasons
why people have left you, and take corrective
action. If you find a particular acquisition source
that proves unprofitable or provides insincere
consumers, start to avoid that kind of source in
your future acquisition campaigns. Or perhaps if you
find that age plays key a role in subscriber
interest and engagement, try to develop a strategy
that helps you deal with customers differently as
they age. The opportunities for improvement are as
endless as the feedback you can garner from your
customers.
---Source: The Wise Marketer November
1, 2007 issue www.thewisemarketer.com
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Melissa Data
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