There are loads of different elements to businesses being successful with e-mail marketing. One of them is list pruning.
One of our clients sent me an e-mail the other day asking if removing nonresponsive people from her e-mail list will give her a more successful list.
Absolutely it will.
Think of it like this . . . when you have a plant with leaves that are half-dead, the plant’s systems have to work that much harder to attempt to send life to leaves and branches that are half-dead.
If you prune that plant and cut the dead leaves, the plant becomes much healthier. It now has free energy to sustain the leaves and branches that really want and need the extra energy, so they can grow.
Same thing with your e-mail list. Let’s face it, there are some people who are tire kickers. These are the people who signup for your lists no matter what you offer and never open the e-mail. They never buy anything. They never call your office for more information. They just sit on your list and suck up energy (all your free information).
So how can you start pruning your list?
1. Start looking at your list’s statistics. Look at the open rates overall and then start looking at the open rates per individual. It might take you some time to do this, but it’s worth it (or have your assistant do this).
2. Then look at your click-through rates (This rate measures how many people click through from your e-zine to your website). Look at the overall number and then look at specifics.
3. You can go all the way up to looking at conversions, but I’ll talk about that later. For right now, start familiarizing yourself with who the openers and the clickers are on your list.
4. Create a separate list for the inactive people on your list–those who don’t open or click. Move them to the separate list and only market to them once in a while.
Make like a healthy plant and devote your marketing energy to the leaves and branches that already show promise of growing.
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.3 Responses to “List Pruning = E-mail Marketing Success”
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April 15th, 2008 at 7:07 am
[...] List Pruning = E-mail Marketing Success | Tech Forward [...]
April 16th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Great pointss! One project we have for an intern is to go through our list and for those inactive ones (not unsubscribed, but just inactive) and send them a postcard (if we have their snail mail) saying something along the lines of “Just in case you haven’t been receiving our emails, feel free to check us out online.” We also will offer them a discount. (We have a problem with companies blocking our email address and employees not knowing this).
April 16th, 2008 at 9:11 am
That’s a great way to mix offline and online marketing.
It’s also nice to get a little note in the mail that’s NOT an invoice!
Thanks for sharing!
-Lena