Commentary
Tactics To Reduce Email Address Churn
- by Loren McDonald , Op-Ed Contributor, April 17, 2014
Email address turnover -- "churn" -- is a fact of life for email marketers, as I said in my previous
Email Insider, but you have many strategies and tactics to help reduce it.
1. Treat subscribers differently based on acquisition source. The battle to reduce churn begins before the …
Nice birdseye view, Loren.
Email address churn rates (excluding inactives) continue to hover in the 20% to 30%+ range per year. On top of this, inactives typically comprise 25% to 50+% of a file. Continually messaging these email addresses costs money and hurts overall deliverability.
For inactives, as Loren mentions, your first line of defense is a re-engagement campaign, preferably with an attractive offer to get these customers re-engaged. This may or may not be successful, depending upon the percentage of these email address accounts that are still being read.
From our experience at FreshAddress working with 25% of the Fortune 100 and many leading marketers and nonprofits, most of the inactives in a marketer's file are the result of sending emails to dormant accounts… like the ones Yahoo purged last summer. Sending emails to these dormant accounts might not cost much but these costs certainly add up over time. Furthermore, it’s not going to drive engagement or revenues because no one’s reading these emails anymore.
If your re-engagement program does not bring specific customers back, marketers should remove these inactives from their files and run them through an ECOA service to re-engage these customers at their current preferred addresses. What’s the benefit of developing great creative, promotions, and campaigns if your emails are not being read?
For further details on how leading marketers are reconnecting with customers lost to inactive or bouncing email addresses, see http://www.freshaddress.com/services/email-change-of-address-ecoa/