04/08/2011
If you aren't clicking with targets, it might be time to let them go
Of all of the ways Trade Only market our services, email marketing is the most cost effective, but it’s also the least reliable. Direct mail, advertising, and exhibiting at shows all offer pretty much guaranteed means of ensuring that our messages are viewed by the target market – you!
However, B2B emails have an average ‘open rate’ of less that 20% - and the ‘click rate’ is closer to 10%. This is despite 50% of businesses making sure that their emails are targeted by geographic and demographic criteria, just as we do. It’s clear that more must be done to further refine the message and the people to whom it’s sent.
Alterian published a report on this subject recently which suggests that a far better means of targeting your email marketing is to create groups based on their previous click through behaviour.
It’s common sense, really; if I’ve sent an email out to 4,000 contacts, of whom 200 have clicked through to my website, then it’s reasonable to work on the principle that those 200 are more interested in my services than the 3,800 who did nothing.
It’s not difficult to collate the email addresses of your ‘click through’ subscribers, as long as you’re using a professional system to send your emails out. And although it’s tempting to keep on bashing the 4,000 in the hope that a different 20% will open your email the next time around, the research indicates that this just doesn’t happen – and you’ll just irritate the individuals who’re not interested in this particular service.
Keep them OFF your follow up emails, and you stand a better chance of a) not having them unsubscribe and b) having them take notice of any future campaigns which might be of greater interest to them.
A good way of engaging the interest of the ‘non-active’ subscribers is to promote a discounted service or to ask them for their opinion via an online poll – and it’s absolutely worth the effort, as it’s much more cost effective to re-awaken an existing subscriber than to get new subscribers.
Lastly, if you’ve had zero activity from a subscriber after 10-12 months, the advice is to let them go. To quote directly from the report, while this might seem like a nonsensical thing to do, given the negative effects on deliverability that emailing a massive number of inactive subscribers can have, you must at some point shed those addresses from your list.
Back to News Archive
.png)
