Email Subscribers Archives

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Almost 25% of Your Email List Has Gone Bad in the Past Year. Here’s How to Fix It.

May 31, 2023 No Comments

Email lists degrade fast, and that affects your inbox reach. Here’s how to make sure your subscribers are real so you can get the most out of the emails you send.

By 2025, more than 4.5 billion people worldwide will have at least one email address. Email is a profitable marketing channel because it provides a direct and personal line of communication with prospects. But it only works if your emails land in the inbox and allow you to connect with your target audience.

Many obstacles will prevent an email from reaching the inbox, but the most common one is an outdated email list. And email lists tend to decay quickly. Within just one year, almost 23% of the average database becomes obsolete. The percentage may be higher for B2B companies, with people changing jobs more often in the past three years.

This rapid degradation of email data causes poor email deliverability, missed opportunities and a decrease in conversions. Let’s see some of the reasons why – and how you can always have a healthy email list.

How the quality of your list affects email deliverability

Reaching the inbox is closely tied to your sender reputation, also known as your sender score. Internet service providers assign this score to every sender so they can automatically determine whether your emails belong in the inbox or in the spam folder.

Everything you do as an email sender – from the content you send, to how often you send it and how much people engage with it – builds your sender reputation.

Your email list quality plays a vital role here. For instance, if you get many bounces (more than 2% per email) or too many spam reports (more than one for every 1,000 emails), your sender score takes a hit. That means your email deliverability is at risk as your behavior begins to resemble that of a spammer.

While data decays quickly, there are proactive steps you can take to always keep your email list fresh. Here are a few key habits you will benefit from.

Start by verifying your email list

With 22.71% of an email list going bad yearly, this is the best place to start. You want to run your database through an email validation service and see how many of your contacts are still safe to use. This may cause your list to decrease in size – but it will increase in effectiveness. Removing potential bounces and other obsolete emails repairs your sender score and gives you an email deliverability boost.

Prune out dormant subscribers

Nothing impacts the health of your list like invalid and fake addresses, but dormant subscribers can cause your campaigns to land in spam, too. They affect your engagement rates (opens, clicks, forwards), thus telling inbox providers that your content is irrelevant. Furthermore, some of these subscribers may not even be using those addresses anymore. So not only will they not click, but those emails may start bouncing as they get deactivated. The best way to avoid that is to remove disengaged subscribers every three to six months.

Handle complainers with care

Like bounces, spam complaints have a negative impact on your sender score. To Internet service providers, they’re a clear signal that your emails aren’t just irrelevant – they actually bother people. Spam complaints alone can be reason enough for your campaigns to start going to the junk folder.

To prevent that, make sure to remove complainers right away. Emailing those subscribers again will only make things worse. Additionally, you could use email verification to detect users who have a history of reporting many emails as spam. Taking them off your list allows you to mitigate the risk of spam complaints and protect your sender score.

Bonus tips to keep your list engaged and boost email deliverability

A healthy database is key to good email deliverability, but it’s not the only factor that contributes to your sender reputation. To keep your emails landing in the inbox, try to:

Send your subscribers the content they signed up for. Whether you promised great discounts or educational emails, keep your promise and strive to over-deliver.
Avoid long breaks from sending emails. You’ll see higher engagement when you’re present in people’s inboxes consistently.
Invite people to reply to your emails. Replies are the best kind of engagement – to inbox providers, they indicate a highly trustworthy sender.
Reassess your email service provider every year. Could there be a better one for you out there? Always go with a reputable company that ensures high deliverability.
Install real-time email verification software on your registration and sign-up forms. That way, you block bad data at the source and keep your email list fresh for longer.
Be flexible with your copy. Test your subject lines, tone and email length and notice the patterns that tend to get more clicks. The more people react to your content, the more trust you build with inbox providers.

Email lists degrade fast. To increase your deliverability, make sure to follow these tips and get the most out of the emails you send.

By Liviu Tanase

Entrepreneur Leadership Network Contributor. Founder & CEO of ZeroBounce

Liviu Tanase is a serial entrepreneur and telecommunication executive with extensive experience in the creation, growth and sale of novel technologies. He is currently the CEO of ZeroBounce, an email validation and deliverability platform.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

5 Truths About Inactive Email Subscribers

May 31, 2022 No Comments

By Chad S. White

Should you email inactive subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked any of your promotional emails in a long time? That seemingly simple question is actually fraught with nuance and complexity. But it’s critical to have a clear answer because maintaining your email engagement levels is probably the biggest factor determining your email deliverability.

Let’s decode that question by discussing five truths about inactive email subscribers.

Truth #1: ‘Inactive Subscriber’ Does Not Have a Standard Industry Definition

Every brand has its own unique definition of what an inactive subscriber is. Brands guide that definition largely by the negative effect that emailing these subscribers has on their deliverability.

However, many brands use a series of terms to describe various degrees of inactivity, almost always for the purposes of treating each of these groups differently. Typically, “inactive” is a point somewhere in the middle of the inactivity spectrum. When a brand seems a subscriber inactive, it often means that the brand emails them less frequently. For example, brands may only send the week’s most important campaign. They may also send a re-engagement campaign series to these subscribers, too.

Prior to a subscriber becoming inactive, many brands define a period where they’re disengaged or lapsed. Often, these subscribers aren’t mailed any less often, but the emails might include targeted subject lines or body copy that’s designed to spur engagement. Sometimes these subscribers actually receive more messages, including triggered re-engagement campaigns, in an attempt to generate engagement before the problem gets worse.

After a subscriber is inactive for a while and re-engagement efforts have been unsuccessful, these subscribers become long-term or chronically inactive. Sometimes they’re colourfully referred to as zombies. Brands generally send these subscribers a re-permission campaign to try to get them to explicitly reaffirm their interest in receiving your emails. If they don’t re-confirm their permission, they’re suppressed from all future mailings.

Truth #2: Lots of Brands Make Exceptions Around Inactives

Businesses are constantly under pressure to expand the reach of their messages by expanding their audience. In a pitch, that often means temporarily changing their rules around inactives.

For example, during the heart of the holiday season around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, retailers risk potential deliverability problems. Why? Because in exchange for boosting short-term sales, they email more campaigns to more inactives. Often that gamble pays off, but not always.

Beyond seasonal exceptions, some brands also make exceptions for individual subscribers. For example, some brands resist suppressing chronically inactive subscribers who are also high-value active customers. They take that risk because of our next truth.

Truth #3: Brands Have Increasingly Flawed Visibility Into Email Engagement

Traditionally, email engagement has been measured in terms of opens and clicks. You needed clicks because some subscribers and some inboxes would block images, making it so that open tracking pixels wouldn’t fire off. Tracking clicks in the absence of opens, of course, is far from a perfect fallback, as only about one in eight opens result in a click.

That gap in email engagement tracking has become a chasm thanks to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which buries real opens in a haystack of fake opens. The impact of MPP is so high that most large B2C brands will have to fundamentally change how they define active email marketing audiences by overlaying non-email behaviours. But even with those difficulties, there’s no escaping the next truth.

Truth #4: Eventually, Every Brand Stops Emailing Their Inactives

That’s because — individual exceptions aside — if you endlessly email subscribers who aren’t engaging, you’ll eventually suffer escalating levels of blocking and junking by inbox providers. At that point, you compromise your ability to reach your active ones that drive the vast majority of your email marketing engagement and revenue. No one wants to do that.

Now, the exact amount of inactivity a brand tolerates before it has to start suppressing its chronically inactive subscribers varies greatly and depends on many factors. This includes their overall engagement rate, email frequency and list size. But generally, it’s around the six-month mark for high-frequency senders and around the 18-month mark for low-frequency senders.

Even if you’re able to safely stretch beyond 18 months, it’s wise to treat 24 months as a hard cut-off. One reason is because some mailbox providers declare email accounts abandoned after two years of no logins. They convert some of those accounts into recycled spam traps. So, the deliverability dangers ramp up significantly after that point. But there’s another reason to respect the two-year limit that’s related to the final truth.

Truth #5: Respecting Inactivity Is Also About Respecting Permission

It’s incumbent on brands to recognize that if a subscriber stops engaging with their emails, at a certain point it means that they’ve withdrawn permission. That’s why mailbox providers have made engagement so pivotal to their spam filtering algorithms.

Anti-spam laws have also validated that line of reasoning. For example, Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) and GDPR both stipulate that brands have to stop emailing subscribers and customers after 24 months of inactivity.

In summary, use these five truths about inactive email subscribers to craft a strategy for managing all the nuances of inactivity. This way, your brand can maximize your email marketing opportunities while minimizing your deliverability and legal risks.

Feature Image Credit: Kevin Daugherty

By Chad S. White

Chad S. White is the author of Email Marketing Rules and Head of Research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, a global full-service digital marketing agency inside of Oracle.

Sourced from CMS Wire

In News

3 Simple Steps to Get Your First 1,000 Email Subscribers

May 11, 2020 No Comments

By Darrell Vesterfelt

Still nowhere near your first 1,000 email subscribers? Ready to give up on growing your list?

It seems like no matter what you do, your list size never changes.

Maybe you still have no subscribers at all.

Either way, that initial climb to 1,000 subscribers can feel painfully slow, maybe even impossible.

The good news is, there are some straightforward, but not-often-shared, ways to grow your email list that can make all the difference.

The three steps I’m going to share with you might seem simple, but make no mistake — they’re the keys to unlocking the exact kind of growth you’ve wanted.

But before we get into that …

You need to know something first, and it’s this:

If you don’t understand who your ideal customer is, you’ll fail.

Sorry to be blunt, but it’s the truth.

Unless you intimately understand your audience, what they’re struggling with, and what they want, you’ll never see the growth you want from your business, let alone from your email list.

So before you follow any of the three steps below to get your first 1,000 email subscribers, get clear on your ideal customer first.

Step #1: Follow the 10-Person Rule

One of the easiest traps to fall into when growing your list is thinking too big too fast.

You have to start small because, well, you are small right now. You have to walk before you can run, that kind of thing.

Enter the 10-Person Rule.

This comes from my friend Nathan Barry, the founder and CEO of ConvertKit.

Here’s what you do:

First, identify 10 people who you know would enjoy and benefit from your writing, from the information you share.

This could be anybody — friends, co-workers, family members, anyone you have even a thread of connection to.

All that matters is that your topic is relevant and useful to them.

Next, once you’ve written down those 10 names, message them personally and ask them these three questions:

What’s your biggest frustration when learning about [topic]?
Which websites, blogs, or forums do you currently visit to learn about [topic]?
I’m starting a new site to teach [topic]. I’d love for you to be one of my beta readers. Interested?

These questions are gold.

Like I said before, the better you know your customers, the more you’ll win, and there’s no better way than by asking them these types of direct questions.

You might even consider sending the first two questions on their own, and if you get detailed responses, ask them the third.

Ideally, you’ll come out of these conversations with 10 new email subscribers, a list of exactly where your target audience hangs out, and your next several blog post topics.

From here, you simply rinse and repeat. As you gain new subscribers, you can ask them the same questions and get whole new sets of responses and suggestions, which in turn helps you grow strategically.

I can’t understate the power of doing this. I know people who have taken it even further and reached out to hundreds (even thousands) of people in a week. It helped them grow their lists from zero to up to 1,200 people. In just one week.

It really works. If you take away nothing else from this post, just make sure you do this.

Step #2: Teach a specific topic

Customers today are savvy, and much more protective of their email addresses than they used to be.

It’s personal information — something they’ll only give out to someone they trust and if they believe they’ll get value from the exchange.

That’s why I recommend you steer clear of asking people to “join your newsletter.”

It’s too vague and often doesn’t clearly present any value. In fact, all it does is promise that they’ll get more email, which I’m sure is at the bottom of their wish list.

Instead, teach them something. Offer something of value, like a course or guide.

“Get a free course on writing great content” is far more powerful than “join my newsletter.”

People want help solving their problems, and I’ve found that if you aren’t getting the email sign-ups or sales you wish you were, chances are people don’t truly understand how you help them solve their problems.

When someone truly wants their problem solved and you offer them a solution, their resistance comes crashing down.

Instead of begging someone to sign up, they’ll be begging you to get in (except the door is already open, so your list will just keep growing and growing).

If you aren’t sure how to implement this, here’s a tried-and-true method:

Think about your audience. What problem might they be experiencing right now in their life, related to your topic?
Can you help them solve that problem? I bet you can. Write down the steps they need to take. It could be five or 10, doesn’t matter.
Now write emails on each of those steps and bundle them together as an email course.
Offer it for free on your blog or website, and set up the emails as a drip sequence after someone signs up.
You’re done! You just made an email course.

That’s all it takes.

It might seem small, but that adjustment can mean the difference between an email list bursting at the seams (and money in the bank, if you’re selling something) and a digital ghost town.

Step #3: Build relationships (and relationships aren’t just numbers)

When you’re building your email list, don’t forget it isn’t just a “list.”

There are real people behind those email addresses. Real people reading your blog and choosing to sign up. Don’t blindly grow your list just for the sake of the numbers and your ego.

A massive list full of the wrong people is not only useless, it’s frustrating, and expensive. You won’t get results. Your emails won’t get opened. Your business won’t grow.

I’ve seen it over and over again.

The “growth at all costs” mindset leads great business owners to resort to gimmicky list-building “hacks.”

It’s not worth it. I promise.

Instead, focus on your audience. Be intentional. If you focus on serving, giving value, and solving their problems, you’ll grow faster than you ever imagined.

Just keep showing up (and email those 10 friends).