Once you’ve got someone onto your email marketing list, you’ll naturally want to do everything you can to keep them there. However, we can’t deny that many people never actually open the emails that we send them – so this raises the question, should we show a little tough love?
What this would mean in practice is using analytics software to identify those people who never open the emails they’re sent, and then taking action to remove them from your list. This doesn’t mean wiping them off your contact list without an explanation, but rather first sending them an email informing them of the change.
This gives you the opportunity to provide them with the option – do they want to stay on your email list, or would they rather stop receiving the emails? If they choose the latter option, a short follow-up survey could be used to get their reasons for opting-out of the service they initially signed up for. That way, you’ll know that the people who continue to receive your emails will actually want to receive them (and you’ll hopefully see better click-through rates as a result) and you’ll also have some interesting data to look at to see why people might have decided to opt out of the emails.
It might sound counterproductive to actively ask your contacts if they still want to receive emails from you, but if they’ve not opened one of your emails for a long time and they’re not showing any signs of doing so in the future, taking the initiative could be a useful option to make sure your list is as productive as possible.
