Food for thought
Companies that can’t be bothered to implement good subscription practices will rarely be bothered to send relevant or engaging email.
True or False?
Companies that can’t be bothered to implement good subscription practices will rarely be bothered to send relevant or engaging email.
True or False?
One thing I repeat over and over again is to not send mail that looks like spam. Over at the Mailchimp Blog they report some hard data on what looks like spam. The design is simple, they took examples of mail sent by their customers and forwarded them over to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project to be reviewed by humans.
In a number of cases they discovered that certain kinds of templates kept getting flagged as spam, even when Mailchimp was sure that the sender had permission and the recipients wanted the mail. They analyzed some of these false positives and identified some of the reasons that naive users may identify those particular emails as spam.
Ben concludes:
The key to email marketing, at least if you read blogs and talk to experts who blog about such things, is to segment your lists. But what does segmenting your lists really mean? Ken touches on it in a recent article about engagement and segmenting.
Segmenting your list means, quite simply, knowing your audience. It means tailoring your message to them, in order to extract as much money from them as possible. It means knowing which subscribers you can push with volume and which you will lose if you increase things too far.
In short, it means not treating all your subscribers the same, instead treating them slightly differently based on how they interact with your message.
To some people, this is too difficult. Ken even quoted someone in the industry as saying
MarketingSherpa has a case study up today about a company that took an aggressive stance on re-engagement that reduced their house list size by over 95%. While the size of the list went down, online sales doubled.
The whole article is a lesson in how to do email right. They are sending relevant and engaging mail to their subscribers. They kept the addresses of people who wanted the mail, but designed a new program from the ground up. All of the key points I, and others, keep talking about is present in their new program.