We like to keep our mailing lists big. Any email address is an additional chance for conversion. But sometimes we have to go against our nature and unsubscribe an address. Let’s just put some arguments on a list…
Email providers such as Google and Outlook.com keep close eye on all email traffic. That means that all the interactions that your contacts have with email is also noted. As you go, you are unnoticed and unintentionally building a profile. And you can only influence this profile by only sending out wanted and opened email.
Research
Research done by MarketingSherpa showed that removing sleeping contacts had a positive effect on all aspects of email marketing. A natural increase of the rates makes sense. But also the spam guards go back to sleep and leave your email messages alone. It sound extreme. Why would you throw away email addresses that you collected that carefully? They might wake up and give a conversion. And as sending email messages isn’t expensive, costs shouldn’t be the main reason the delete them.
Six months
Email contacts that haven’t responded for more than six months, will probably never react on your emails. the email marketers that MarketingSherpa interviewed for their research, started cleaning up the list after six months. Not that they pushed the delete button immediately. They periodically checked their lists. Once a contact’s “hibernation” exceeded more than six months, they were transferred to a new mailing list. The goal of this separate list is simple. To see if those contacts could be taken out of that hibernation.
Tactics
The classic tactic is to send a new opt-in campaign to all these addresses. Experience shows us however, that this type of campaign hardly gets any response – especially with sleeping contacts. Maybe you can reactivate them with a coupon. But this will never work if you got these addresses by using a coupon or gift. Sometimes unsubscribing certain contacts is the best way to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing in the long run.
