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The people who put the most effort in their email marketing solutions find the greatest success. That’s not just common to email marketing, that’s practically the way everything works! Here are a couple of ways to work a little bit harder and get better email marketing results.

You might have heard that it’s very important to remove in-active subscribers from your mailing list. Definitely a great tip, but before you go crazy eliminating contacts, let’s look at this a little deeper. So, first you’ll need to separate the ‘bad’ or in active-emails, from the good and have them segmented into their own list. This way you can send this not-so-responsive group emails prompting them to take some form of action. This means asking them to click on a link they are interested in your email or getting them to re-sign on to your mailing list. Once this email is sent, you’ll be able to better understand if you can remove a contact, or if you can re-establish a relationship with them. This is an easy way to start having a more targeted list.

It is widely understood that an in-active user is one that has not opened or clicked on links in your email over a given time period. And now we know how important it is to send that group an email to test if they are actually in active. But before you can determine this, you must first understand HOW a contact opens their email, otherwise you might be assuming they are inactive when they could be potential customers.

There are a percentage of people who do not download images in their email programs. The way that tracking open rates works, is that they will not be counted on your data for opens if subscribers do not download the images. However they will still be able to click on the links in your email. So if you attribute your success based on open rates, you might be doing even better than you think! You should also change your strategy to considering both your open rates and the clicks. You will get a much more correct understanding of you which contacts are not active by using the opens and clicks data in your email marketing solutions account.

Before deleting an inactive contact make sure you have taken the time to determine that they REALLY are inactive: give them a chance to re-confirm their interest through one or maybe two emails that are designed to get them to take action, like signing up again to the list or clicking on a link that might be of interest to that contact. Then look through your metrics and see if they haven’t opened or clicked on your email so that you can delete the ones that haven’t.

Another thing to focus in on is keeping a keener eye on ‘Unsubscribe Rates’. If you measure the success of your mailings by looking at which of your contacts have unsubscribed, then here is another bit of info that will make you think twice. Instead of unsubscribing, many users use the “spam” or “junk” button to remove an email from their inbox. This is especially true for senders that the contact deems untrustworthy.

Users that have pressed the junk or spam option will not be counted as unsubscribed. That means that a low amount of unsubscribes does not tell you everything you need to know

Your focus really should be on metrics like ‘opens’ and ‘clicks’ as a measure of your success with email marketing solutions. The better email marketing solutions experts look for ways to read their data to initiate higher quality and more refined contact lists. Knowing the whole story about your data will help you make your list more refined and therefore give you greater email marketing solutions success!

Rudy Barell is a Senior Business Development Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing software used by businesses around the globe. Experience how easy it is to build your mailing list, create eye-catching emails and track your success using detailed reports with the complete email marketing program. Try it free!

The success of your email marketing is dependent on how good your list of contacts is. Email marketing industry research has revealed that three months after signing on to your mailing list your contacts begin to disappear off of your radar. This reduction in contacts’ interest should be anticipated with any contact list, however there are a few methods to ensure that this downsizing is kept to a minimum, subsequently making sure that the size of your high quality contacts is far larger. The following will provide you with four useful tactics that will assist your email marketing efforts.

“Important Client” Incentives:

As a retailer, using incentives can attract subscribers to continue their interest in your emails and services. Providing a simple promotion or discount for subscribers that haven’t opened recently can reactivate a dormant user. In addition, you can send these kinds of offers to in-active users so that they have the chance to update their contact information and preferences etc. This will help gather information on their continuing needs as a customer, as well as give you current contact information.

Send an Email Asking Their Opinion:

The most direct method of knowing why contacts haven’t been responding to emails is to ask them. Sending surveys through email marketing solutions will ensure that you are gathering information on exactly what the user wants and does not want. Keep the survey questions simple and to the point to make sure the survey isn’t too long. Customers are easily shied-away by too many complex questions. Also, be sure to include questions on their most preferred type of email message to receive, the best time to contact them by email, and suggestions and comments section.

Take a Closer Look at Your Contacts:

By looking a little closer at your contact list you will notice some similarities with certain of them. By identifying the commonality you might discern what it takes to get through to them. You might find they all belong to a specific demographic previously un-targeted through your past email marketing campaigns. They might all be in a different time zone, or all older males, or teenage girls. Scrutinizing more closely may trigger an idea of how to get through to this previously unresponsive group, and give you an easy solution for getting them back.

Test Your Email Marketing Tactics:

There is no harm in spending a little time testing-out different ways of sending to determine if it can attract a few more in-actives to the “good side”.

Knowing that you are always sending out your emails at the same time might mean you need to change the time of day you are sending out. If you normally send emails to people in the morning, then try changing that to the afternoon or evening. Then watch for the results and compare them to previous email marketing campaigns. Also, play around with the frequency that you are sending out your campaigns. If you are used to sending once every two months, then try sending it out once a month. Then try sending it out every two weeks.

Also, try creating different content. In your analysis of you contacts if you’ve noticed a trend among in-actives, consider packaging the content differently for this group. You can also mess around with the format of your email marketing software campaigns. Start testing the differences between text versions vs. more dynamic looking campaigns.

A huge consideration is your subject line. Simply changing your subject line can solve a lot of your dormant-contact-issues. Some contacts won’t open an email because the subject is the same or almost the same as all the ones sent to them in the past. The idea here is that they are assuming that if the subject doesn’t change neither does the email.

Testing out different methods of sending out campaigns will activate the pulses on some of your more zombie-like subscribers, but will also give you valuable information on what their wants and needs are.

Experienced email marketers put the time in to work on their contact list. Now is your opportunity to ensure that you are getting the most out of your email marketing campaigns by putting in that added elbow grease so that your subscribers are aware of and listening to your messages.

Rudy Barell is a Senior Development Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing used by businesses around the globe. Create eye-catching emails and track your success with detailed reports for your email marketing solutionsTry it free!

categories: email marketing software, email marketing, list management, list maintenance, list manager, marketing, contact list management, subscriber management, marketing, online marketing, email