Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Breaking up is always tough. But sometimes you have to do it for your own best interest. Take email, for example. Sometimes you just have to let folks go. It’s for your own best interest.
There’s been a common mindset over the years that email is basically free, and all you need to do is grow your list, send them emails forever, and you’re good to go.
But your list is like an apple tree. And you have to treat it like one.
As an apple tree grows, it begins to produce fruit. Kind of a no-brainer, right? But as the tree matures, and the branches get bigger, longer, and new branches grow, something happens. The new branches grow in every direction. They point up, down, back towards the trunk, away from the trunk – it’s very organic and chaotic.
And you’d be wrong.
The apple farmer steps in and as the tree grows, manages the growth by thinning the branches, cutting off the ones that point in crazy directions that could never bear fruit and may actually harm the tree by rubbing against other, good fruit bearing branches and damaging them - ruining the harvest. He makes sure only branches that point away from the trunk and are healthy remain on the tree. Doing so insures that each tree bears the most fruit possible.
Your email list is the same. Most lists are grown organically, from newsletter sign up forms, marketing initiatives, counter sales, quote requests, and a hundred other ways. That’s great, and how it needs to happen. But just as in the case of the apple tree, that list needs to be pruned occasionally to maximize it’s potential. Your list needs to be pruned.
Over the past decade, email SPAM has become a very expensive problem in the internet community that service providers have been forced to deal with. According to M3AAWG (Messaging Malware Mobile Anti-Abuse Work Group – the ultimate email regulatory authority recognized by service providers) in 2014 90% of all email traffic was SPAM, with an estimated actual cost of over $20.5 BILLION dollars worldwide. The estimate at that time was that if allowed to grow at the same rate, within four years the cost would balloon to $198 BILLION annually.
Needless to say, over the past five years, service providers have been significantly tightening down on email senders and traffic in an effort to combat the astronomical rise in the cost of SPAM by implementing a litany of new checks and balances to make sure that senders are legitimate, and recipients actually wish to receive emails sent.
So how do you ‘prune’ your list?
The first thing you can do is remove people who haven’t opened an email from you in a long time, and clearly won’t be any time soon. If you send weekly emails, and someone hasn’t opened and/or clicked one in a year, it’s time to make a decision on what to do with them. The first step is to send them an email asking if they still want to receive your emails. Ask them to click a link in the email if the answer is yes, or click an opt out link (or do nothing) if not. Clicking the yes option is engagement, clicking no or doing nothing tells you what you need to know as well to make a good decision.
The second thing you can do is send messages that appeal to your whole list and make them want to open them. I wrote about that last month, and you can see that article on www. powersportsmarketing.com in the articles drop down on the marketing best practices tab. I’ve still got a lot more to say on that subject though, so stay tuned.
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