Did you know that your email list can become stale? And that’s a bigger problem than you might realize because…
Emailing a stale list damages your email deliverability and hurts conversions both now and in the future.
Join me in this video, and get a quick breakdown of what a stale email list is, how it becomes “stale,” the dangers of emailing stale subscribers, and a simple starting point for rescuing your email engagement.
TRANSCRIPT:
Did you know that your email list can go stale?
By that I mean a portion of your subscribers will stop opening or engaging in any meaningful way with your emails. Some email addresses will stop being used but they’ll still be able to receive emails. You may even be getting bought signups.
There are a lot of things that could happen, but the biggest one is people stop opening emails for one reason or another.
The risk of having a stale list and not knowing it and continuing to email thousands and thousands of people who no longer check your emails, who either ignore them, delete them, or they end up directly in the spam folder, even if this person hasn’t marked you as spam, even if this person hasn’t unsubscribed, just the act of you sending them emails over and over and over again and them not engaging is that it hurts your sender reputation.
Your sender reputation is what tells inbox providers like Google, for example, if your emails deserve to be in the inbox right or do they deserve to be in the spam folder.
So emailing a stale list is how you increase the chances that Google or whoever sends you directly to spam. Even though your emails aren’t spam, even though people haven’t marked you as spam, even new subscribers could receive your emails, but they go directly to spam, and that is determined in large part by your sender reputation.
There are other factors but email engagement is a big one that people often overlook.
When people are marking you as spam, you know when you’re getting spam complaints and when people unsubscribe. That’s no big deal. You want them to unsubscribe if they want to unsubscribe. That’s a good thing.
But what people don’t pay attention to is email engagement specifically low email engagement. Companies don’t have strong re-engagement strategies in place. They let subscribers go lapse for years on end, and they just continue to email, and it does nothing but hurt your deliverability in the long run and increase the odds that you just end up in spam for everyone, not just the people who aren’t opening.
This is your call to action to get serious about your list health and your deliverability specifically when it comes to your email engagement. Start re-engaging those lapsed subscribers and then purging the ones who continue to ignore, delete, or just completely check out on you.
You’re doing your company a favor in terms of deliverability.
You’re doing your subscribers a favor by cutting out all the noise they don’t actually want in their inbox.
And it’s just a win-win all around.
The sooner you come to terms with not looking at the overall amount of subscribers in your CRM as a success metric and start looking at actual engagement like the portion of subscribers who actually open, read, and act on your emails, the more realistic view you’ll have of where your email marketing program stands.
