18 FebHow to Stop The Slow Death of Your Email

There’s no doubt that all us of us would like to running one of those fantastic email campaigns that have delivered 100%, 200% or 500% ROI etc, the kind that regularly get featured in case studies on leading email marketing guru websites, blogs and newsletters.

The reality is that most email marketing campaigns, and even yours if you have one, are just just getting by just about with okay results.

But your program might be dying a slow death, thanks to the way subscribers behave and the new email landscape we now live in.

It doesn’t take a statistician to reveal that open rates are in decline.

Some of that is down to the growth of image blocking (though that excuse is getting a little old). Some of it might be delivery issues. Some might be a decline in the quality of the emails (hope not).

Slow death factors

But there are two factors ensuring that declining responses will likely affect every email program that keeps doing more or less the same thing as before.

First, there is ever-increasing competition for subscriber attention. Both from other emails and all the other ways people now have to get information and promotions (most notably social media).

Second, the longer someone is on your list, the less engaged they are (on average).

Think beyond list growth

There are two big issues on the horizon here.

First, using list growth to compensate for declining response rates is not a long-term strategy.

The older and bigger your list, the more new addresses you have to find to compensate for list aging. And the low-hanging fruit is likely already gone: your frequent visitors or customers are already on the list.

Engagement is also a deliverability issue

The second issue is deliverability.

A while back, people in the industry were predicting that those organizations managing incoming email (particularly the big ISPs) would broaden the list of criteria used to define spam (unwanted) email to include how people interact with a sender’s messages.

If recipients aren’t interacting positively with an email, this indicates the message is unwanted and the reputation of that email’s sender suffers.

The obvious solutions aren’t enough

So what can you do?

If you keep doing the same thing, your response rates will fall, you’ll be under a lot of pressure to grow your list and you may run into new deliverability problems.

The obvious and glib answer is to certify your emails and get into all those advanced tactics that we keep putting off because things are still pretty rosy. Now is the time to start investing time and resources in things like segmentation, testing, trigger emails etc.

But there’s more to the challenge than just improving targeting (which is what nearly every advanced tactic is about at its heart).

Consider why older addresses tend to disengage from your emails.

Some reasons are inevitable: people change interests, move jobs, etc. But there’s also another factor, that of irrelevant messages.

You can send the occasional irrelevant email and people will forgive you. They’ll still look out for your next email. But if enough emails in a row are irrelevant, then the recipient losese interest and switches off and future emails can get ignored, even those emails that are valuable and relevant.

And the longer someone is on your list, the more chance there is that they’ll encounter one of those catastrophic interest drops.

A retailer who sends out offers cannot expect people to keep opening and clicking on promotional emails, however good and targeted those offers might be. I’m not going to buy a new digital camera (or camera accessory) every week or even every year.

See engagement as its own objective

If engagement becomes critical to delivery, then you must be less tolerant of letting people go inactive, even though many of these inactives may still be “unemotionally subscribed” and likely to buy/respond at some later date.

So how do we keep them engaged?

First, we can start to think of responses not just as sales, downloads, registrations etc., but also in terms of engagement. So what we used to think of as purely process metrics (opens, clicks etc.) might now become valid goals in themselves.

This encourages us to invest in email content that drives interaction: feedback surveys, teasers, etc. It also suggests those selling via email should also focus on engaging content as much as targeted offers.

And I wonder if we might reach the stage where the occasional email is used as a loss leader…where the offer is so good that it may even have a net financial cost to the sender to make it.

But the loss leader email boosts response. It keeps people away from the “extinction threshold” and keeps those engagement metrics up so that future emails have a better chance of being delivered and responded to.