Visual Contenting April 2016 | Page 55

EMAIL MARKETING Signs that are considered positive by algorithms include: moving a message out of the spam folder/marking as not spam, replying, adding the sender to an address book, reading/viewing or moving to another folder or tagging. On the negative side, signs considered bad by algorithms include: deleting a message without opening or reading, marking as spam or moving to the junk folder, or reporting the email as a phishing attempt. Clicks are not tracked as a metric for reputation, as tracking what a user does within an email generally is considered to be a violation of privacy. Defining Inactives Taking it a step further, the majority of marketers will gauge inactives as anyone who has not responded, opened, clicked or acted on any email in the past six to twelve months. Inactives may be best defined as people whose email addresses are still active and valid, but who are not engaging in any way with your emails. The average list’s inactive rate is around 60 percent. This means that a list of 10,000 has only 4,000 true subscribers reading its posts. Considering the huge amount of time online marketers spend building their lists, having a majority of the list not responding after signing Visual Contenting up is a huge loss in terms of engagement and revenue. How to Re-Engage There are multiple Do’s and Don’ts in the re-engagement process. Simply asking customers to update their email information can have surprising engagement results, where re-permission emails—where the sender attempted to get long inactive recipients into receiving emails again—were found to be ineffective. Those only had a 1.8 percent average read rate. While the definition of an inactive subscriber will be unique to each company, ultimately you need to be able to define an inactive subscriber as someone who has not opened/ clicked within a certain amount of time by analyzing your subscriber history. Use past data to determine the average amount of time between when subscribers sign up and when they stop engaging. Then strategize your re-engagement program around that window of time by having a strong call to action, removing non-responders and keeping subscribers engaged to prevent those inactive users. You can also send a survey to current subscribers asking something as simple as what they think of your email campaigns and offering a small incentive can help to understand where things need to be shored up, but also to point out which customers have remained engaged over time, as they are your most likely responders. Don’t immediately, however, cull your list if you don’t see a good response to winback emails. Studies have found that 45 percent of people who receive a winback email will re-engage at some level with the brand, but only 24 percent of them actually read the winback email. The average time between receiving a winback email and re-engaging with a subsequent message from the sender was around 57 days. Even in light of this information, the majority of inactive subscribers will stay that way. Having a clear idea of when you ought to disengage for good can save you problems in the future. From Reach Mail Check out this infographic on Visual Contenting.