Many people tend to think that the best thing for an email marketing campaign is the size of the mailing list , but this idea is far from reality. Although size matters, we can have a huge list of users who do not do any good to our mailings. For a user to be useful, they not only have to be part of our list, but also be interested in what we have to tell them. The user who is not interested in the email can react in several ways : ignoring it (in the best case) or marking us as SPAM . It is clear that the second option damages the reputation of our mailing and will penalize us in the following ones. But what few people know is that the first option , inactive users, also damage the reputation .
deliverability
Therefore, although at first this reduction in the mailing lists may “hurt”, it is telecommunications email list often best to eliminate these inactive users sooner or later to avoid affecting deliverability. When several mailings have already been sent to a mailing list, filters can be generated in our database that show us the users who have not reacted to any of them and eliminate them, since they are not adding any value to the list and are also penalizing deliverability . We do not recommend eliminating these users too soon, since keeping them on the mailing list is generating opportunities, but we do recommend doing so when it is proven after many contact attempts that they ignore our emails. On the other hand, before eliminating them, a reactivation strategy should be considered.
It is also very important to include an unsubscribe link in the email , so that these users who are not interested and who only produce a negative effect on our mailings can unsubscribe.
In addition, we can carry out actions to improve the reputation with active users . Let's imagine that in our periodic mailings we have around 30% of openers. If we filter our list by users who have opened at least one of our latest campaigns and we send only to this group, we can imagine that the opening and reactivity rates will skyrocket , doing a great favor to our reputation and, therefore, to deliverability. This type of action on the most active user groups can be repeated periodically to maintain a good reputation that affects the rest of the mailings.
Segmentation in the mailing lists is also vital to always provide relevant content for users and improve the statistics of our mailings. The rule is, ultimately, to maintain quality statistics in email campaigns that maintain a good reputation. However, rate optimization is a matter of deliverability, and we must never lose sight of the real numbers. It is not about always sending our messages to very small segments and obtaining 70% opening rates; we must also keep in mind that it is necessary to send mass mailings to generate contact opportunities, even if our opening rates decrease. The strategy must take into account objectives of reach and ROI and, on the other hand, take care of the reputation through actions such as those we explained. In the next article we will discuss this and other email marketing strategies that are considered “best practices” and that we should reconsider.
