Send to Engaged Subscribers
One of the key elements of email marketing is reputation. Your reputation determines whether or not you can send to your subscribers inbox or not, known as deliverability.
Although there are a lot of things that go towards your reputation, such as who the email is coming from and the email service provider that sends the email, the behaviour of your audience gives service providers, like gmail and yahoo, indications on how relevant and engaging your email is.
Basically, the more engaged the audience is, the more opens and clicks, the higher your sender reputation will be, increasing the chances of your email being allowed through their filters.
How do I make sure that I send to engaged audience?
First of all, only send to people that you have permission to send to.
Secondly, make sure you’re removing your opted out subscribers. Ideally, this should be automated through your Email Service Provider (ESP).
Doing this will make sure you’ve got permission and shows you’re cleaning and managing your lists, all positives for improving your deliverability and sender reputation.
But why stop there?
Make your emails stand out from the crowd and go that extra mile by segmenting your audience by behaviours.
Your ESP should be able to identify who opens and clicks your emails.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses Measures or querying data views to do this.
Generally, I segment the audience in tiers like this:
– Highly Engaged (Opened or Clicked in the last 30 days)
– Engaged (Opened or Clicked more than 30 days ago, but less than 45 days ago)
– Slipping (Opened or clicked more than 45 days ago, but less than 90 days)
– Unengaged (No opens or clicks in the last 90 days)
Tip – Run this segmentation regularly and apply the engagement tier to the subscriber on your Single Customer View.
This method gives you three segments with historical behaviours, indicating your emails are being consumed, improving your sender reputation and deliverabilty.
Use these segments to deliver personalised messages and content, adapting offers and cadence based on the behaviours.
Should I cut the Unengaged subscribers?
No, not straight away.
It may be a good idea to add this audience tier to a re-engagement journey, making them aware of your products and services or prompting them to take up your offerings.
If you notice that they are still unengaged, it may be time to remove them from future sends.
Do you have any other tips for maintaining your email list? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
And if you need a hand in setting this up for your email marketing program, we’d love to help you out.