Your leads’ inboxes might be noisier than you ever imagined.
I was shocked when I came across this Facebook thread where people were competing for who had the most unread emails in their inboxes:
TRANSCRIPT:
So I was not planning on recording a video today, obviously, but I just came across a thread on my personal Facebook and I could not keep it to myself because…
They were hosting this impromptu competition on who could win by having the most unread emails in their inbox.
And I kid you not, these numbers were in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. I saw screenshots that ranged anywhere from 20,000 all the way up to 200,000 unread emails.
As an email marketer, my first thought was:
That’s your emails! Those are your subscribers!
Those are people that you think are leads because they’re on your email list but they have not engaged with your emails in a very long time. Maybe hundreds to thousands of emails that you’ve sent them that they’re just sitting in an inbox somewhere, never to be opened, never to be read.
So, if you need another reason to get serious about list engagement and re-engagement strategies, this is it.
You can put together a re-engagement campaign that’s automated—these are sometimes called win-back campaigns—that will help you figure out who’s stopped opening your emails so that you can send them a series of win-back emails to either re-engage them, so get them to reconfirm that they still want to get emails, or to get them to unsubscribe.
And if people don’t do anything, then you unsubscribe them yourself.
Because the danger of continuing to email these people who never open your emails or who haven’t opened them in a long time is that it hurts your sender reputation. Which means that over time, as your sender reputation diminishes, Google will send you straight to the spam folder, even if your emails aren’t spam.
Make sure you are paying attention to your email engagement, especially the segment of subscribers who have thousands and thousands of unread emails in their inboxes.
The subscribers who are no longer opening yours are hurting your sender reputation, even if it’s unintentional. And you’d be better off purging them from your list if they’re no longer opening your emails.
