I’m Subscribed to a Cat Lover’s List But All I Get Is Dog Food.

The numbers are typically against you. According to most online sources, each year you will only keep 70% of your subscriber base, while the other 30% will change their email address or just stop checking it altogether. Welcome to List Churn, notorious for list devastation and one of the many causes of:

1. Lower Deliverability
2. Decreased Click-Throughs
3. Open Rate Shrinkage
4. And general bad overall performance rates.

List Churn is expensive.  Because, you’ll want to replace those lost (30%) email addresses. And normally, you do that with acquisition campaigns, which costs time and money.

Can you stop List Churn in its tracks?  Probably not, because;

1. People like to move, travel and experience. They may change their Hotmail for a Gmail email address or change jobs that offer a company email. Whatever the case may be at some point the email address you have for these estimated 30% of subscribers becomes invalid.
2. It’s not them, but maybe it’s you. You’re sending too many emails or you have lost the initial focus of your email messages causing list fatigue.  Or you’re not sending enough email to your subscribers’ and they have forgotten you.
3. You’re renting lists or borrowing your friends list. You are just plain practicing poor list hygiene by adding unsubscribes back into the fold because you just can’t let go.
4. You are sending Cat food campaigns to the people who opted into the Dog Food List on your Pet Food Site.                                          

As annoying as List Churn is it’s a fact of life. Everyone has it.  But there are a few things you can do to lessen it:

1. Make it easy to subscribe to your list. Don’t ask a million questions upfront, just get the basic information with a link to a preference page that your new member can fill out at their leisure.
2. Always confirm each address before they are added to your list database.
3. Inform your new list member what type of information they can expect from your list and how often they should expect to hear from you with a Welcome Letter.
4. Present a clear, easy to find opted out method for your current subscribes. And say goodbye when they do opt-out; never re add them to the database.
5. Run a few test emails before each campaign to make sure everything is A-Okay. You want to make sure all the links you have included actually work, the pictures aren’t too big and the formatting looks great from phone to PC.

Your efforts will not go unrewarded, but note you will always have invalid addresses and non-responsive list members.  You can’t do anything when an address becomes invalid, except remove it when it’s discovered.  You can, however resuscitate non-responsive list members with well-planned out re-engagement campaigns. When successful with these campaigns, make sure you recognize your revitalized members; Send a Welcome Home letter with coupons and contests.

Don’t forget to ask your revived list members why they lost interest in the first place.  Useful information for any list owner.  Offer a link to a preference page, so they can tell you what they are interested in to how often they want to hear from you.  You may find your newly responsive list members are more active with your emails once they realize that you really do care about them.

Contact the specialists at Dundee Internet: we will help you with email list problem even if you use a competitor.*

*excludes competitors tools i.e. HTML formatting editor.