Imagine you’re at a cocktail reception, surrounded by a group of prospective clients, to whom you are enthusiastically extolling the capabilities of your firm’s litigation practice. One among your group listens earnestly, asks questions, and suggests you connect with her to chat again. But the others, uninterested and distracted, sip their drinks and glance at their phones. Another simply walks away. Undeterred and oblivious to all signs of boredom, you chatter on - until the host takes notice and escorts you away, depriving you of your audience.
You would, of course, never do this in real life. So why do it in your email marketing? Failing to recognize and address a lack of engagement among your audience can hurt your marketing efforts.
In legal marketing, we tend to focus on a few key metrics of email campaigns. We celebrate our engaged subscribers – those who open our emails, click links, and/or update their subscription preferences, and thereby indicate a willingness to continue connecting with us. We lament those who just walk away – those who opt out.
But we ignore those who usually account for the bulk of our list – the unengaged. These are recipients who continue to receive our emails but, for any number of reasons, don’t open them and haven’t gotten around to walking away. Perhaps they find it’s easier to just click “delete” instead of looking for the “unsubscribe” link. Regardless, they’re not interested. But their email addresses remain active on our lists and will get pinged every time we do a mailing.
As such, they pose a significant but often overlooked pitfall. The more frequently you ping recipients who never open your emails, the more likely you are to be flagged as a spammer by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). ISPs have metrics software too, and they know when you’re bombarding their email users with unwanted messages. They may blacklist your email domain, shutting off access to their users and depriving you of your audience.
But it doesn’t have to come to that. Knowing when to say goodbye to unengaged subscribers will minimize your risk of being shut out. And as a bonus, it will also give your open and click-through rates a boost.
Use your email service platform to identify subscribers who haven’t opened your emails and/or clicked any links within a particular timeframe. That timeframe will depend on how often you use the list in question. If you send to the same list once a week, review the engagement numbers every six weeks. If you send once a month, review the list everything three to six months. Give recipients a chance to engage. If they don’t open the first or second email, maybe they’ll open the third. But if they’ve gotten five or six messages and haven’t opened any of them, that’s your cue to end the conversation and move on. Cleaning your lists in this way will do wonders for your numbers. For example, the simple task of removing unengaged subscribers can boost your click-through rates by double digits depending on the size of your list.
Go one step further and implement a robust opt-in system that requires new subscribers to confirm their email addresses. This ensures that the email addresses you collect are valid, active, and owned by subscribers who want to receive email from you.
Lastly, keep in mind that email lists are always growing, shrinking, and evolving. If you find yourself thinking ruefully about all the email subscribers you’ve had to let go, remember there are opportunities to reach out again. Reintroduce your firm. Invite them to your next online program. Ask them whether they’d like to re-subscribe to your publications. The upside of having to say goodbye is that you get to say hello all over again.
By Gina Eliadis, Creative and New Media, Ober/Kaler for the July/August 2016 issue of Capital Ideas.