New year, new list! Sort of. For eCommerce retailers, one email marketing best practice they should implement at the beginning of the year is a list clean. And with a reengagement campaign, you can actually help sweep away bad email addresses AND generate revenue.
What eCommerce retailer wouldn’t want to start the new year with working on a couple goals right off the bat: higher deliverability and more revenue.
First Things First
One thing we want to make abundantly clear: never ever purchase a list of email addresses. Not only can you never verify if the email addresses are valid, but sending emails to subscribers who haven’t opted into your messaging can lead to complaints, lower deliverability, and ESPs like Google automatically flagging your messages and sending them to the spam folder.
On top of all that, it makes cleaning your list down the line a bigger chore than it needs to be. Stick to ads and SEO to drive traffic to your site, and then capture those shoppers with a signup form.
List Cleaning and Reengagement Campaigns: Two Essential Email Marketing Best Practices
Getting the most from your email marketing efforts means getting high engagement from your list of email subscribers. Unfortunately, over time, more and more of those subscribers will either become dormant and stop interacting with your messages, or their emails will become disused (making them dead email addresses).
Determining which email addresses need to go can be tricky, but one method you can use is a Reengagement Campaign. This simple and targeted email campaign reengages with subscribers you haven’t heard from in a while and, in the best case scenario, gets them to make a purchase.
Putting These Email Marketing Practices Together
Being able to put these two best email marketing practices together is an excellent way to kick off the new year and get some spring cleaning out of the way. When you’re ready to spruce up your email marketing, get started with this basic guide below!
Part 1: Put Together a Reengagement Campaign
Before you get started, you have to plan out your reengagement campaign. As we mentioned previously, this strategy is an excellent way to boost engagement with your business and generate a little revenue in the process. If you intend to pair it with list cleaning, you’ve got to come up with some creative ways to get subscribers to reengage such as refer-a-friend offers, special sales, or discount codes. These offer types can help you determine who is really engaging with your emails.
Pairing your reengagement campaign with a list cleaning effort means setting up one or two additional emails to send out. This will help you really determine who needs to go.
Part 2: Determine Your List Cleaning Parameters
To effectively pair your reengagement campaign with your list cleaning efforts, you have to set up a list of email addresses that meet the criteria you’re looking for.
At a very basic level, this can simply be a time thing. If a subscriber hasn’t opened an email in X amount of days, then they are added to the list. If you want to get more granular than that, go for it! Maybe some subscribers have only opened 1 email in the last X amount of days. Maybe they’ve never opened an email. Or maybe they’ve opened but never clicked. How you build this list is totally up to you, but be careful of setting rules that might be detrimental. Maybe a subscriber hasn’t opened an email in the last 15 or 30 days because they keep missing your messages. Set some realistic rules. You don’t have to get aggressive with your list clean.
Part 3: Launch Your Campaign
Now that you’ve built the list and your emails, it’s time to hit send on your campaign. If you’re using multiple messages, make sure you’ve set up an adequate amount of time for the campaign to run before you go to the next step in the process.
Part 4: Clean Your List
Once the campaign has completed, it’s time to clean. Regardless of whether you did a drip or a single campaign, non-openers should be removed.
If people did open but didn’t take advantage of the offer you placed in your campaign, you might consider removing them as well. But again, you don’t have to be too aggressive with your list clean. You can set these subscribers on to a list to monitor their engagement for possible removal later.
Spring is Coming
While confetti may still be falling from the New Year, it’s never too early to start thinking about how to better optimize your marketing efforts. Get a little spring cleaning out of the way using a reengagement campaign to help remove dormant or dead email addresses, and start off your first quarter right with better deliverability and more revenue.
Get More Out of Your Email Marketing With Springbot
Springbot is the only eCommerce app that allows you to launch email marketing and paid advertising campaigns from a single platform. Access our knowledge base to help you optimize your marketing strategy or work with an account manager to implement email marketing best practices that drive results.
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