Email marketing is a great way to stay on the top of your customers’ minds, even if they don’t open or click on your email. However, don’t think your customer will always know who you are without opening your email. This philosophy only works when you are smart enough to use an email address and from name that states who you are. We will call these guys “subject line purchasers” those who purchase from email without opening by calling in their order.
For example, Sports Authority has a from name of “SportsAuthority.com” and the from address is “SportsAuthority.com@…” I don’t open their emails often, but I do see the emails often (and I only see the from name in my blackberry before deleting) therefore, they are the first company I think of when it’s time to buy some sports equipment. Simple!
Okay, who cares? What are you talking about?
I am talking about your re-opt in campaign, in which you remove those who are not responsive to your email. I will cover a good strategy for this in a later post.
I want to get this piece of info in front of you before you delete some important customers. I was working on a re-opt in campaign for a client, as I was putting together the list to be re-activated I took “non-responders” from the last 6 months to start with. That list was fairly large so I wanted to knock it back a little and that’s where external sales data comes in to play and the point from above starts to make sense.
We took a list of all people who have purchased from the call-center in the last 6 months and ran that against the email addresses we had in the “non-responders” list. Lo and behold we just about removed a very important part of our email list, the “subject line purchasers.” How important? Over $2,000,000/year important.
This sounds like a no-brainer, but most people I speak with about this don’t even think about scrubbing the “non-responders” against purchasers because marketers think if subscribers don’t click or open they obviously aren’t interested.
What can we do with these customers as now we know they are responsive to our marketing? We can try our luck by sending them a direct mail piece (which we are going to do) in attempts to increase their value and to be even smarter we can drop them a call since that is their preferred method of ordering.
On a side note, using a match-back analytics program that aggregates your customers and all of their activity in one place to clean your list will keep you safe.
Until next time…
