After the pandemic cleaning your email list matters more than ever. If you do direct postal mail or snail mail, it’s worth cleaning those lists too.
Cleaning and decluttering make you happier
Frankly, cleaning everything became necessary in 2020 with COVID-19. People were washing grocery bags and sanitizing everything to try and stay ahead of the virus. But as we get out of COVID, maybe it is time to clean our mailing lists! Cleaning and decluttering make you happier. Conversely, a messy workplace or computer desktop adds to anxiety and stress.
Unsubscribes: bad for marketers
From a marketer’s perspective, unsubscribes are bad. For it makes email marketing platforms worried that you are a spammer and are violating the CAN-SPAM act. A range of solutions has emerged that check your email list for deliverability, analyze open and click rates, and can segment your list.
From a customer’s perspective, an entire industry has developed to try and trim your ever-growing inbox. Because as consumers, we sign up for something like “deal alerts” for flat-screen TVs, and then we buy that TV but do not unsubscribe from the five businesses that we signed up for. There is a slew of solutions that encourage you to unsubscribe from lists that you are no longer interested in.
Email Marketing: cost-effective
In a digital marketing world of shiny new options in digital media, we underestimate the power of good old email. 60% of small businesses do not use email marketing primarily because of all the glamorous talk of other forms of digital marketing. Compared to all other forms of digital marketing, email marketing is the most cost-effective. One estimate puts a $42 return on 1$ investment in email marketing.
Intuit ( TurboTax, Quicken) must have thought it through before paying $12 Billion to acquire Mailchimp in 2021. Mailerlite was acquired by Vercom for $90 million in 2022 according to TechCrunch. The marketing industry must be onto something.
Cleaning email lists: some marketing questions
Here are some questions to ask as you clean your mailing list for B2B and B2C campaigns:
- Who is taking the action you asked for? Whether buying something or signing up for a meeting, a prospect who did what you requested is on their way to becoming a customer. This is the bottom of your sales funnel and should be considered a customer. It’s now time to enter the details into your CRM system. For high-value customers, it is worth your time to have a conversation and find out why they bought. Just that people are pretty involved immediately after they buy, and their decision process is fresh in their minds. Talking to new customers soon after purchase gives valuable clues to content that might resonate with prospects.
- Who is clicking? Some folks open every email, but only those interested will click on an action “Buy” link. If they bought, you have the data from the point above. Clicking (sometimes multiple times) on action links indicates interest.
- Who is opening? Opening an email is enormous. Even for the smaller segment of people who open all emails.
- Who is not opening? Anyone on your list who is not opening can be placed in two buckets (a)The email is not reaching the inbox. It might be going to the spam folder. (b) There is something wrong with the email itself for eg, in B2B, the person has changed.
Cleaning is not glamorous, but cleaning your marketing list will make your marketing more effective, and you’ll be happier!