Lucy Conlan explains how email segmentation can help you to identify and re-engage the quiet and the shy.
Marketers work hard to acquire and retain customers but sometimes fail to notice those who are a bit quiet or inactive. Even a decade ago it seemed inconceivable that we would have such a wide range of possibilities for communicating with and collecting information on our customers as we do today. With direct mail, it would not have been financially viable to target dormant customers for instance. Now, much effort can be stacked up even in the early and intermediate stages of the customer relationship.
However, email is often perceived as a low value means of communication and it can be all too easy to just bat out messages to a base of mixed customers. The interested and active ones will respond, so what’s the problem if the rest don’t?
In fact, there are several problems with ignoring unresponsive customers. For instance, it makes it difficult to measure statistics accurately as volumes are swollen with unresponsive segments. Isn’t ignoring unresponsive customers the marketing equivalent of bad manners? Maybe these customers are giving you a clue by not responding. Bad manners in this context could lead to the dreaded scourge of your customers hitting the “spam” button.
The very size of an organisation’s email list can be a political minefield. Senior management love to hear that there is a 6 or 7 figure email list. In the pressure for more sales, the cries of “email everyone” can be heard in many companies. But a large, general, email list is often just ineffective.
It takes a brave and robust email marketer to assess and address poor performance. So what are the traits of disengagement, how do you identify the signs?
It’s worth creating email specific segmentation. First assess the overall performance of your list and then look at the pattern of the worst 5%. Your first metric should be the number of people that open the email. As the parameters will vary according to the frequency of your emails, look at volumes by identifying how much of the file has never been opened at all, then how much that hasn’t been opened in a month, then in a week etc.
Talk differently to the people within the varying segments. If you email them twice a week, try reducing it to once. Throw in a special offer, a prize draw or a survey as alternative subject lines to entice them to open the email. If this doesn’t work, humour can often re-engage the shy ones. I have seen subject lines such as “We haven’t heard from you”, “We still haven’t heard from you”, “Was it something we said?” generate significant open rates from dormant recipients.
Remind customers that they have different choices open to them. Give them the opportunity to change their communication preferences. If you identify dormant customers who you believe it could be profitable for you to stay in touch with, try sending them a direct mail or give them a call – it could be that they have just changed email accounts – at the very least talking should allow them to tell you why they’re not engaged.
If you have tried a variety of approaches, then relax and put them with all the other sleeping partners – group the dormant together and keep them in the loop at an increasingly low frequency. Exclude them from all other activities, and do not include their number when asked for list size. Your list will grow again, and in the meantime just sit back and take the credit for the higher levels of open and clickthrough rates in your results.
Lucy Conlan is a member of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit and a senior marketing manager at the UK’s premier arts centre, the Barbican, where she has been working on Customer Relationship Management and campaign integration activity, including on the re-launch of the award-winning Barbican website.