Whilst spend on attracting and acquiring new clients is under pressure, one area we’ve seen increased demand is in ongoing engagement communications. In many cases brands have wanted to provide support, advice and content that moves beyond the commercial relationship. With the increase in email communications being sent out at this time, Si has created his quick ‘Top 5’ tips for improving your emails, which we will release on a daily basis. Here’s your first tip!
Time for a spring clean
Firstly, let’s work out who we’re communicating with. It’s common for people to get preoccupied with the size of database, but this viewpoint zones in on quantity, not quality, and can actually have a negative impact on your eCRM.
Now’s the time to step back look at who you’re communicating with, and understand whether they are really interested in you and your brand. What’s the point in investing time, energy and money into communicating with someone who isn’t engaged, or indeed listening?
Many businesses want to keep people on their database ‘just in case’ but in reality, when someone has lapsed and becomes disengaged, reactivation is often an extremely low conversion rate. Furthermore, they can have a negative impact on your wider performance, as Email Providers analyse your activity to support users by filtering spam.
If your email campaigns have low open rates and are being deleted without opening, you’re more likely to be viewed as spam when Email Providers are filtering. Reduce this by only emailing contacts who have a genuine interest in your communications, move the rest to ‘lapsed’.
So what does a ‘lapsed’ contact look like? This will vary from business to business, but you should start to create your own categorisation and test it. For example, if someone hasn’t opened any of your last 5 campaigns, you could assume they have lost interest. Now look at your historical data, how many people came back to the brand beyond this point.
It may take a few different iterations to define a lapsed contact, but once you have then you should look to move these contacts out of your communications flow. We all have email subscriptions that we aren’t interested in any more, but in our busy lives we don’t often go to the effort of unsubscribing. Interrogate your contact database, and understand who sits in this segment, and communicate accordingly.
Finally, to help with your spring cleaning, make sure the process to unsubscribe is as easy as possible. For years businesses have made it complex to ‘leave’ in an attempt to keep someone as a prospect, but if I’m really not interested, it’s a waste of both of our time.
Ultimately, we want to communicate with people who are interested in hearing from us.
Check back tomorrow for tip number two of five.