How to Deal With Email List Fatigue
How to keep your email list from falling flat.
Overloading your customers’ inboxes with countless emails, bombarding them with irrelevant messages and content, or not consistently seeking new customers to campaign to can cause any publisher’s email list to eventually fall flat. But there are more than a few ways to alleviate the fatigue. AD spoke with Jeff Pedone, director, email marketing, Incisive Media, about how his company keeps its lists fresh and its customers engaged.
What factors do you think actually cause email list fatigue and how does it impact response?
Pedone: When it comes to lists, I think that many publishers still have a direct mail thought pattern regarding marketing because that was the dominant channel for a long time. Multichannel marketing is best, but some publishers take the direct mail mentality and move it over to email; email is a digital channel and behaves differently in the marketing mix from direct mail. If you have a customer who comes in wanting a certain product or service and then you start showing them another product you deliver or unrelated messages, that is not effective for what you’re trying to sell.
As far as the impact to the lists, from what I’ve read and studied through statistics, there’s a 30 percent list attrition rate per year on most marketing databases, which is pretty standard, and I surmise that much of this is attributed to the wrong medium, non-relevant content, and improper messaging regarding frequency and targeting.
What is Incisive Media doing to get around that?
Pedone: We are doing three different things. First, we are setting up online preference centers where our customers can elect what type of editorial and promotional offerings they want. It gives us good insight into what areas of expertise they operate under and how we should be messaging to them, always striving toward relevancy and anticipated email messaging. It also gives us the opportunity to showcase various products and get feedback. It’s all very good information that drives our reasoning when utilizing an email list.
Second, we are segmenting our lists. Once we receive data from the preference center, we can segment the lists based upon what our customers’ preferences are and then send out very specific campaigns based upon that data and what we have learned.
Third, we are utilizing lifecycle marketing, targeting individual customers based upon their previous relationships with us and anticipating the future needs. Messaging is then crafted for a specific purpose (i.e., moving registrants from trial to paid subscribers) and triggered at specific intervals, based upon specific actions taken by the recipient. Lifecycle programs built around audience retention and renewals are also in the pipeline.
How long have you been utilizing these strategies and what results have you seen?
Pedone: Our usage of lifecycle marketing and the preference centers are currently being implemented and have been over the past few quarters. Before we started using those strategies, the 30 percent individual product list attrition rate I cited was similar to what we were seeing internally. Now, we’re seeing our open rates go up, we’re seeing click-through rates grow, and we’re seeing much more overall engagement with our lifecycle email campaigns. We are setting up targets to double all of our key engagement metrics in 2009.
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