Despite the ever growing list of marketing platforms available, email marketing continues to deliver some of the top numbers when it comes to ROI and customer engagement. So logic says you should work hard to get people on your list and keep them there.
That’s true; you should make sure your emails are effective and relevant to your users.
However, you can also expect a 25% drop in interest every year. If that’s the case for your users, it’s not actually a bad thing if people unsubscribe from your email list.
While it’s great to boast of an email list with 5,000 users on it; it would actually be more effective to have a list of 1,000 engaged users.
Why you might ask?
- Deliverability
- Open rates
- Click rates
Inactive Users Can Hurt You
The average office work receives 121 emails per day. They delete more than half of them without even opening them.
In fact studies show that up to 60% of email is spam, and so internet service providers (ISPs) have been working hard to cut down the junk and only deliver emails that are likely to be of value to the user.
What’s more is that “dead” emails can be spam traps.
Think of that AOL email address you had back in the day. You may not have used it for 10 years, but it may still be on someone’s marketing list. It’s likely that this email has turned into a spam trap – a type of fraud management tool ISPs use to identify spammers, and block their future emails.
What does this mean for you?
It means that if a large portion of your list is not opening your emails, email systems are going to categorize your emails as useless and stop delivering them.
To be clear, I’m not even talking about your emails landing in the spam box; I am saying they will not be delivered at all.
Add in the users who do actively move your emails to the junk box, or mark them as spam, and you could have some serious credibility problems.
The Solution?
Keep your email list clean and tidy by making it easy to unsubscribe and occasionally removing users yourself.
Every marketing email you send out should include an option to unsubscribe. While this may be only a small link in the email footer, it’s important for it to be there.
If users cannot find that link they will take other steps, including marketing your email as spam or blacklisting your email address. I’ve even closed accounts with companies that do not give me the option to opt-out of messages.
Good Email List Maintenance
Going one step further, you may want to actively clean up your list to remove users who have not opened your emails in some time. Three months is a good time frame to use if you are an active email marketer, but this should at least be done annually.
Before you start deleting, I’d recommend trying a win-back campaign to see if you can reengage users. But if that doesn’t do the trick, then it’s time to delete the emails.
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