We know you want your emails to reach every single person on your huge, ever expanding email list. By paying less attention to size and more attention to detail, your email campaigns will be more successful than ever.
Marketers have a difficult time proving the ROI of their efforts in general. When it comes to email marketing, focusing on the wrong performance metrics (such as list size) can be detrimental to your program and your budget.
Marketers continually lose potential revenue by placing too much focus on growing email lists. In the beginning of a marketing campaign push, list growth can happen very quickly, as much as 5 percent per month or more due to sweepstakes, free trials, product announcements and newsletters. As buzz dies down, the lists stabilize and marketers are in awe of the huge list they’ve built, but forget to cultivate their lists. With growing lists come growing responsibility!
CEOs and executive management put emphasis on absolute list size without taking into consideration the harm that comes from putting the focus on quantity instead quality. So you’re sending emails to a great big list, but you are sacrificing your email reputation and increasing your costs in the process!
Analyze your email performance metrics
When done correctly, Email marketing provides the highest ROI of any other marketing channel. According to the Direct Marketing Association, for every dollar spent in 2009, email marketing returned $43.62. Internet search marketing followed second at $21.85. However, to achieve this type of ROI, you must shift your focus (and performance metrics) from list size to list quality. This means paying attention to the readership and engagement of your subscribers and removing unhappy subscribers (they just give you false hope for a conversion any way).
When sending in large volumes, you need to monitor the number of unopened emails, complaints and unsubscribes because ISPs pay close attention to your email behavior and your subscribers’ responses. Typically, most ISPs look for consistency in mailings and gauge the unsubscribe rate versus the complaint rate based on the volume. ISPs may place a 24-hour block on your IP address if your complaint rate is higher than your unsubscribe rate.
Keep complaint rates low
Many email service providers offer the ability to throttle messages on a campaign so you can break up your humongous list into more acceptable mini lists. Keep the sending volume low to help minimize your overall complaint rate. Check out this sample of ISPs complaint threshold rates (the maximum amount of complaints allotted before they institute a 24-hour block on your IP address) from Return Path.
Hotmail: 2 million emails = 2.9% complaint rate (30 day average)
Yahoo: 5 million emails = 2.0% complaint rate (30 day average)
Comcast: 5 million emails = 1.1% complaint rate (30 day average)
Source: ClickZ
As you monitor your complaint rates you may find that you are experiencing a high volume of complaints and a low open rate. This may be an indication that the content you are providing is not relevant to your subscriber list. You should monitor the click-to-open rate, which measures the quantity of people who clicked divided by the quantity of people that opened the email. This is a quick way to visually compare the relevancy of the email’s content to other campaigns.
A guaranteed method of keeping your complaint rate low is to send relevant content to your subscribers, however large or small your list is. Segmenting your database based on subscriber interest not only increases brand loyalty, but improves overall campaign performance.
Tidy up your list
The scary part of this process is pruning the complaints out of your list. You may have concerns about losing potential sales or prospects. Trust me, trimming your list will only improve its quality due to the following factors:
- Your improved email reputation offers higher deliverability and superior list quality.
- Removing complaints will lower transmission costs and money wasted on those who do not buy – and decrease your chances of getting blocked.
- Sending to fewer but more relevant contacts increases transmission speed
- Removing complaints and non-active subscribers provides more accurate insight into how your email campaign is performing, which allows you to make beneficial changes to your content strategy.
Take action
To help lower your volume of emails and reduce your complaint rates, these follows these 4 tips:
- Throttle campaigns to send in smaller batches. This decreases the volume of complaints per hour.
- Schedule larger campaigns to go out a few days in a row versus sending to your entire list in one day by segmenting off your list into different categories, such as time zone or user demographics.
- Segment your email lists by the major domains to monitor statistics while keeping the volume low. This provides a clear idea of how recipients are reacting to your mailing, per domain, so you can make real-time changes to your strategy.
- Pull the list of subscribers who marked your email as SPAM and batch unsubscribe them. Recipients who flagged your email as SPAM/JUNK have ultimately opt-ed out without taking the appropriate action to unsubscribe. You can keep this list of people to send them a targeted, re-opt-in campaign with an offer at a later time to possibly reactive their interest.
Keystone
Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Cultivate your email lists and you will end up with much better success rates.
What other tips do you have for improving your email success rates? The community wants to hear from you!
Caitlin Marco contributed to this blog post.
Craig,
Caitlin,
how exactly do I find out if someone marked an E-Mail I sent as Spam?
“…Pull the list of subscribers who marked your e-mail as SPAM and batch unsubscribe them…”
How can I know which subscriber marked my mail as spam?
If you have an E-mail Service Provider and have registered for Feedback Loops with the ISP’s, you should be able to pull a report of all the subscribers who complained (marked your e-mail as SPAM/JUNK/ABUSE) and unsubscribe them. This process may or may not be automated based on the ESP’s features. You may have to manually add them to your Do Not E-mail ( DNE) list, if the process is not automated.
If you’re using an in-house solution, your IT department will need to provide you with the logs in order to see the reports sent back to you by the ISP. In either case, you must have Feedback Loops set up in order to get into this type of information. Once you have the list of subscribers, you can add them to your DNE list.
The Spamhaus Project has a really great reference article on how Feedback Loops work that includes feedback loop links for each major ISP with information about their complaint reporting practices.
Follow this link: http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=isp%20spam%20issues#119
Thanks a bunch, especially for that link Caitlin!