LifeCycling to Your Email Goals

Everything has a lifecycle including email. Our lifecycle, like everything else has a beginning, middle and an end with a lot of stuff going on in-between. Comparatively speaking an email list subscriber’s lifecycle is not much different, each subscriber or email address has a distinct beginning (when someone subscribes to your list), a middle (accepting your email messages) and an end (severing their membership by leaving your list or junking your email). However, unlike our lifecycle, you can harness the lifecycle of email using simple strategies to deliver the right message at the right time.

Because email is such a valuable marketing tool, it’s prudent to utilize every method at your disposal to keep your members interested, engaged and reengaged – after all, you receive a lot more benefit sending messages to an involved subscriber rather than continually sending messages to those email addresses that have lapsed into oblivion. So, rather than send that one message to all three lifecycle stages, plan to deliver the right message at the right time by knowing and understanding the various email lifecycle stages that can be tracked and measured, expected and managed.

Email Lifecycle Stages:
There are three main email lifecycle stages. They are the:

1. Potential or interested customers: A prospect who opted in to your list, who potentially wants to receive communication from you and may not have a buying history with your company. Your goal at this life cycle might be to:

• Confirm their subscription
• Set their expectations so they know what to expect from you by use of a welcome letter
• Ask for their email preferences: (i.e. How often do they want to hear from you)
• Conversion (Visits to your website, purchase a product, forward an email, etc.)

2. Current or engaged customers: At this stage, your subscribers like your product and your email messages. It’s been shown that the engaged group has a direct correlation between email marketing messages and growth revenue, therefore the goal here should be to move the subscribers in the first and third stage to this stage, and keep them there. You might do this by:

• Acknowledge their patronage- consider creating a VIP program
• Continue to send personalized, relevant targeted messages based on their mailing preferences and buying habits
• Email renewal notices
• Send messages based on their website page visits to your company
• Encourage them to share their good experience with you with their friends and always, always say THANK YOU

3. Disinterested or lethargic customers: This is the last lifecycle, the separation phase where your email is considered an annoyance, or they don’t care because they never open your email anymore, and probably delete it or earmarks as spam. They’re just not interested. However, they haven’t unsubscribed so is there still hope? You goal here is simple, you need to move these subscribers to the second stage, the engaged stage. You may find success by first removing addresses that haven’t responded for ( let’s say for example) the past 6 month and segment the rest into smaller manageable groups. Plan to execute a reactivation email campaign that may include a:

• Invitation to reconfirm to your list
• Link to a preference page
• Survey with an offer
• Special just for that day

Each of these life cycle categories are measurable. Each can be predicted. Each, can be managed. The email campaigns goal should be different for each lifecycle and can be as simple as having a goal to have your interested customer confirm their new subscription. Just as you plan, your email campaigns have a plan for the lifecycle of email. And the best part, it’s easy to do. Don’t know where to begin, contact the team at Dundee Internet, list hosting provider since 1997.