How To Eliminate Low Quality Email List Subscribers
http://cdemails.com/articles/6117/1/How-To-Eliminate-Low-Quality-Email-List-Subscribers/Page1.html
September Danforth
Yesmail is an award winning email marketing company based in Portland, OR. Yesmail builds email software to improve targeting, segmentation, and ROI. By September Danforth
Published on 08/4/2009
Read how removing poor quality subscribers improves the success of your email marketing list.
Believe it or not, the best way to optimize your email marketing campaigns is to reduce the size of your email list. Opt-in email marketing is really the best practice, but just because your readers request to receive your newsletter doesn't mean that they will enjoy it forever. In truth, you can expect at least one third of your list to dry up once every six months, and if you don't remove these subscribers, you will be paying for a lot of underperforming readers. We are going to review one of the best ways to optimize your list: removing deadbeat subscribers.
Non-Converting Subscribers Cost You Money
As your newsletter list grows, you will begin to notice that along with an increase in converting readers, there will also be a raise in underperformers. These "deadbeat subscribers" don't convert, don't read your emails and will sometimes mark your emails as spam! Unfortunately, this will seriously waste your money as your list grows, because you still have to pay to send those emails. Even worse, these bad subscribers will lead to inaccurate results when you decide to test different headlines or email templates. You must actively erase these deadbeat subscribers.
Be Smart & Optimize Your Email Marketing Programs
Even though it will help to simply delete Bad readers, be careful not to overlook the real problem: getting bad subscribers in the first place. Believe me, it's far better to have a small, but high converting list than a very large, but poor-performing list. With this in mind, you need to focus on collecting great subscribers from the start.
1. Your sign-up form placement
I find that many new email marketers do a great job at making their sign-up form too visible. For example, if you put your sign up form on every page of your website, what you're actually doing is making it incredibly easy for subscribers to sign up, and this leads to an influx of poor subscribers. Ideally, you want to include a newsletter call to action in each area of your site, but also make them go through a few steps in order to sign up. Simply making it a link off your website to another page will do wonders to your list quality simply because non-converting readers don't want to be on the list bad enough to take an extra step!
2. The pre-sell
Sure, you know your email newsletter is beneficial, but nobody else does! You must tell your potential subscribers about your newsletter and sell them on it. This will boost the number of quality subscribers simply because once you have pre-sold them on your list, they are going to want to receive it! Just sell you newsletter like you would one of your products and then watch your conversion rates explode.
Follow these steps, and your conversion rates will increase, you will save your money by not wasting it on poor subscribers, and your readers will be ready to receive, and respond, to your company's newsletter.
Non-Converting Subscribers Cost You Money
As your newsletter list grows, you will begin to notice that along with an increase in converting readers, there will also be a raise in underperformers. These "deadbeat subscribers" don't convert, don't read your emails and will sometimes mark your emails as spam! Unfortunately, this will seriously waste your money as your list grows, because you still have to pay to send those emails. Even worse, these bad subscribers will lead to inaccurate results when you decide to test different headlines or email templates. You must actively erase these deadbeat subscribers.
Be Smart & Optimize Your Email Marketing Programs
Even though it will help to simply delete Bad readers, be careful not to overlook the real problem: getting bad subscribers in the first place. Believe me, it's far better to have a small, but high converting list than a very large, but poor-performing list. With this in mind, you need to focus on collecting great subscribers from the start.
1. Your sign-up form placement
I find that many new email marketers do a great job at making their sign-up form too visible. For example, if you put your sign up form on every page of your website, what you're actually doing is making it incredibly easy for subscribers to sign up, and this leads to an influx of poor subscribers. Ideally, you want to include a newsletter call to action in each area of your site, but also make them go through a few steps in order to sign up. Simply making it a link off your website to another page will do wonders to your list quality simply because non-converting readers don't want to be on the list bad enough to take an extra step!
2. The pre-sell
Sure, you know your email newsletter is beneficial, but nobody else does! You must tell your potential subscribers about your newsletter and sell them on it. This will boost the number of quality subscribers simply because once you have pre-sold them on your list, they are going to want to receive it! Just sell you newsletter like you would one of your products and then watch your conversion rates explode.
Follow these steps, and your conversion rates will increase, you will save your money by not wasting it on poor subscribers, and your readers will be ready to receive, and respond, to your company's newsletter.