Every organization doing email marketing, whether it’s a B2B service based business or a B2C e-commerce site, will accumulate a large contact database that will eventually grow stagnant as prospects drop out of the funnel, or past customers no longer come back to shop. If you’re staying on top of your email marketing list hygiene and automated segmentation, then these growing lists aren’t a problem, as you’re able to properly categorize all of the contacts in your database, and understand where they are at in their lifecylce.
Unfortunately, most of us marketers are far too busy doing other things to stay ahead. When it is time to finally start cleaning your lists, here are a few things you should do to understand the actual status of those lists and clean them up.
1. Suppress or remove contacts who are bounced or unsubscribed
Most email marketing and marketing automation platforms have built in tools in place to prevent attempting to send emails to these bounced or unsubscribed contacts, but for the purposes of understanding the size and health of your lists, it makes sense to clean those contacts out.
2. Segment those who have high email engagement from those who have low engagement (or none at all)
You can get as basic as “Did or Did Not Open/Click any email in the last X days”, or more advanced by using some lead scoring rules. Segmenting engagement is a critical step in staying on top of your email deliverability, as I’ve outlined in a previous article.
3. Further segment those who are not active via email, but have visited your site in the last few months.
In some cases, email clients can be configured to not send open or click events to your Email Marketing platform, in which case you must rely on the website tracking to see their engagement (leveraging UTM will make this clear). For those who just flat out haven’t engaged with email at all, you may not want to include those contacts in future email campaigns, but there are some things you can do to keep your messaging in front of them through other channels.
4. Segment the stages of your Buyer Journey
Hopefully this is already being done to some extent through the automation set up in your funnel, but give it another look over and make sure you’ve clearly separated the prospects, from the leads, from the qualified leads, and from the customers. Understanding the life stages of your contacts are critical to delivering proper messaging.
5. Segment your one-time customers from repeat purchasers or VIPs
We’re all aware of the idea of the Pareto Principle as it’s applied to business – 20% of the customers account for 80% of sales. Whether or not your sales metrics line up exactly with those numbers, you better know, and segment, who your biggest stakeholders are.
6. Segment or Tag your contacts based on items purchased or services used
Use this time to identify and corroborate your best performing (and worst performing) products or services. This will also help personalize any email content you create moving forward.
What’s Next?
Now that you’ve cleaned your lists, use this as an opportunity to send more targeted messaging using the segmentation you’ve just done. Running a promo for a limited release item in your store? Use the segments from Step 6 to identify those contacts who have purchased similar products from you in the past as your audience. Looking for beta testers or customer feedback of a new feature release or service? Use the VIPs or Champions of your brand from Step 5 as the audience to ensure you get the feedback from those who are your most critical stakeholders.
What about those inactive contacts? Should you delete them? Maybe. But we’ll cover a few ideas in another article down the road.
Automation
With a bit of planning and leveraging your email marketing/marketing automation tools, you can set up processes to automatically segment and clean your lists over time. Rather than have to set time for some cleaning and allow your deliverability to suffer in the meantime, leverage the workflows and integrations available to you to make it a near automatic process.
At MH Digital, our process when onboarding with a client is to start with a list hygiene audit to make sure we’re able to keep your lists clean and set up your email marketing program for long term sustainability. With clean and organized lists, you’re able to be confident in your lifecycle marketing strategies and send the right messages, to the right audiences, at the right time.
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