Avoid this email marketing strategy at all costs, Email marketing is super effective. As they say, “The money is on the list.”I routinely send out emails with an average open rate of over 30%, which is amazingly industry standard. And, the average ROI for an email campaign, well, it’s pretty spectacular. The average return is $36 for every dollar spent, and it can go way higher than that if you’re doing everything correctly. And if you’re doing things poorly, you’re not really going to see any ROI at all.
But that’s why you’re watching this video because we’re going to make sure you’re doing things right. So what’s the biggest mistake? This is the one that I see almost every single time that just really crushes an email strategy. It’s not scrubbing your list. Okay. Think of it this way. You got an email list. Doesn’t matter if you have a hundred people on your email list or a million. You got a list. You send them emails. Some people naturally want to open your emails, and some people don’t. Do you know what happens if you keep sending emails to the portion of your list that doesn’t want to open up the emails?
QuickSprout:
Well, let me give you a real-life example. All right. So, when I first started email marketing, I ended up growing my list to a little bit more than 28,000 contacts. And this is with one of my earlier blogs. And the blog was also on marketing, it was called “QuickSprout.”When I was at 28,000 emails, my open rate went from 20 plus percent to down 15%, and it started going all the way down to 10%. I was like, “Why? I’m continually getting new subscribers.”Why is my open rate continually going down?”It was because I was sending emails to people who didn’t want them. But you’re probably thinking, “Neil, if you’re sending emails to people” who didn’t want them, there are still people who want”the email, and those people will open it up, right?”That’s what you would think, but it doesn’t always work that way.
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See, Outlook and Gmail, and other email platforms, have their own algorithms, and what they do is, let’s say I’m sending an email to a thousand people. If a hundred of them don’t ever open up my email, but there are 900 that sometimes do open up my emails, eventually those hundred people who aren’t opening up the emails, it actually taints the other 900.
Here’s what I mean. Even though they’re not connected, the way the algorithm works is, “Oh, you keep sending these”emails to these hundred people who don’t want them.”So your email’s more likely to be spam. So even though those other 900 people were engaging every once in a while, some of those emails that you sent to those 900 people will end up in their spam box or their promotions tab, even if they didn’t click the spam button or the promotion button. In other words, you need to make sure that you’re only sending emails to people who are engaging, or else the people who do want your emails, in a lot of cases, they won’t see your emails. And not only will your open rates go down, but, your overall clicks and opens will go down from the total number.
Because when you scrub your list, you’re deleting the records of the people who never engage.In theory, that causes your open rates to go up. But more importantly, it’s not just a percentage. You want the total number of opens and the total number of clicks, of people clicking on the email to go to your website, to increase even if your list size is smaller. So what you need to do is constantly scrub your list. Different email tools have different ways of doing this. I use ConvertKit.So in ConvertKit, for example, it’ll segment out, in a rolling 30 days, all the cold subscribers.”Cold” means people who haven’t engaged in the last 30 days. So what do I do with those people? I delete them.
Now, some people like putting them on a re-engagement campaign, where you only send out emails to those cold subscribers and try to get them to re-engage, maybe sending them an irresistible offer. You can do that as well. I highly recommend that. But what we do is because most of our emails are already really good, and we offer way more value than really selling anything actually at all. So what we do is, we tend to delete them because we found for,re-engagement campaigns aren’t as effective as they may be for more businesses. Because 95% of our emails provide value and don’t sell anything.
Well with most people, maybe 30% of the emails are selling people and 70% are providing value. So we don’t have the same issue. But for most people, you would want to do a re-engagement campaign to those cold people, send them something irresistible, and then for the ones that are still cold and don’t care, delete those. For the others that started to reengage, put them back into your main list. That’s how you ensure that you keep getting amazing opens, and amazing clicks and your emails get delivered to people’s inboxes. That’s how you succeed with email marketing.