According to MailChimp – one of the email marketing platforms that’s gaining popularity through the years – the open rate of email campaigns averages only 20%. But we can’t deny the idea that companies prefer to grow their email lists, making it their focus strategy. But how about those subscribers on the list which don’t press nor open their email campaigns? Are they worth keeping? Maybe they should start considering their business ROI.
What is ROI?
ROI stands for Return on Investment, which is a measure of profitability that evaluates business’ performance through net profit divided by net worth. It deals with the money you invest in the company and the return you realize on that money based on the net profit of the business.
ROI can serve you in several different ways to analyze how your business gains profit. It can be by measuring how your pricing policies perform, inventory investment, capital equipment investment, and what you have there. Your company can also use ROI by dividing net income, interest, and taxes by total liabilities to measure rate of earnings of total capital employed, dividing net income and income taxes by proprietary equity and fixed liabilities to produce a rate of earnings on invested capital, and dividing net income by total capital plus reserves to calculate the rate of earnings on proprietary equity and stock equity.
Now that you know what ROI means, how can it be improved? Let email list cleaning begin!
Why clean your email list?
Cleaning your email list(s) doesn’t directly mean removing bounces and unsubscribes from your list because it’s your email vendor or software’s job to do that for you. What this article is trying to say about cleaning your email list is that why should you keep those subscribers from your email lists if they don’t even “care” about pressing nor opening your email campaigns? Cleaning your email list can have added benefits like reducing abuse complaints from your subscribers to an extremely low number. And most importantly, it lowers the cost of emailing. Now, it would be better to let go of those emails that don’t give any effort with a simple press to open your email campaigns and instead, stay connected to those that do, providing a better return on your investment, time.
It’s great that there are already email marketing platforms that enable tracking of your email campaign statistics. This statistics shows how well your email campaigns are performing and finds out the members of your email list which are actually taking action on the messages you send to them. This is the marketing reality and why knowing your email campaigns statistics is really so essential to know the percentage of those who take action over time.
MailChimp, for example, uses “Member Ratings” to rate each of any business owner’s mailing list. 5-star is given to those subscribers which perform lots of activity, 4-star to those who have a little more activity in opening or pressing email campaigns, 3-star to those who just started opening or pressing your email campaigns, 2-star to those who have no activity (mostly new members), and 1-star to persons who have unsubscribed or re-subscribed or soft-bounced in the past.
Deciding which Starred subscribers to clean is key to boost your ROI.
How to clean email list(s)? Cleaning email lists can be done in many ways. And as you apply this, be prepared to take action on the results.
Group Subscribers by Segmentation
It’s not yet time to delete names from your list. First, if you use MailChimp, for example, and add your email lists one group at a time then send several email campaigns. This is to observe credible actions from each of your subscribers. With the results, you might be surprised – either you will be amazed or shall I say, become alarmed. You’ll be removing those that are less important making a dramatic reduction in your list size. It might give you about 20-45% population of your new segment in your email list. To this list of folks send a few campaigns and analyze the results. Then make a comparison to each of the groups you’ve tested. Make sure that those subscribers who are the most active, including those who are just new are being taken good care of by your marketing initiatives.
Confidence in Email List Cleaning
Ensure a backup copy of your complete list which is automatic on marketing automation platforms but you can export for easy segmentation later. On your second copy of your list, which you can rename for easy reference, delete all of those subscribers that have already unsubscribed or re-subscribed, and even those who are new that haven’t had a history of making engagement with your email campaigns for too long. Due to this, your list is reduced but the folks who are really important with the added benefit of decreasing the cost you are spending for your email campaigns.
Practice Ongoing Email List Cleaning
Since subscribers are unpredictable, where they may become disinterested, you must repeat this process of list cleaning regularly to gain the most ROI for your marketing efforts. You may notice an increase in your list’s engagements, the positive effects of trimming your email list. In conclusion, it isn’t the length of your list that matters, it’s the quality of engagement in your list. Engaged lists, no matter how small, help improve the transfer because ISPs judge senders based on subscriber engagement.
It is in a marketer’s nature to keep all of the subscribers but now that you understand that not everyone will engage with your email campaigns, it’s important to regularly trim your list. So, it’s much better to get rid of those that don’t make an effort to engage and spend more time with those who do. You will not only gain a more credible email list with valid emails but your business ROI will also improve. How’s that for you?
Good News
One of the marketing automating platforms we talked about is MailChimp, just one of many vendors that are on the Cazoomi integration platform, SyncApps. Connect the software that your business is using with MailChimp.
Here is a list of just some of the MailChimp SyncApps available today:
Salesforce.com to MailChimp here
SugarCRM to MailChimp here
MS Dynamics CRM 4.0 to MailChimp here
Dynamics CRM to MailChimp here
NetSuite to MailChimp here
Perkville to MailChimp here
Pipeliner to MailChimp here
Xero to MailChimp here
Volusion to MailChimp here
Bullhorn CRM to MailChimp here
If you have further questions on best to integrate your software, visit our Community (join in to be part of our Email Marketing SyncApps community)
Jeff
Your Small Biz writer in Cagayan de Oro
