Email Marketers slog hard to fourfold their email list by adopting various tricks and tips. Right from offering free downloadable content to making the presence of the company felt in social media, marketers leave no stone unturned to build a genuine email list. But, after a point, this well composed list tends to decay as marketers face high list churn rate.
Decoding Email List Churn Rate
Well, email list churn rate is the percentage of email subscribers who have left from your email list over a period of time. An email list churns in two different ways:
1) Transparent Churn – Transparent churn includes the set of recipients who have unsubscribed from your email list on their own. It also includes those email addresses who have reported your emails as spam. Furthermore, all the hard bounces are also considered as transparent churn.
2) Opaque Churn – It includes the set of recipients who are not opening your emails due to various reasons. To mention some, users might no longer be interested in your emails; or your emails are going to spam folder. But, these subscribers can be reached again through re-engagement emails or any other tactic.
According to a report by Getresponse, list churn cuts down about 25-30% of the average email list every year. That’s a whooping number! However, 2% churn rate is considered to be good as per the industry standards. An email list with genuine email addresses will automatically have low churn rate, and organizations can reap substantial ROI.
So, how do you maintain low list churn rate? Well, Uplers with their expertise bring to you some heavenly measures in order to reduce your email list churn
How to Reduce List Churn
1) Consider using double Opt-in
Collecting genuine email addresses for the email database is a dream of every email marketer. But, do they follow the best practices while collecting this database? Well, probably not! They tend to gather the data from all sources to increase the quantity of their database, thus compromising on the quality. A substandard email database will have a higher churn rate, ultimately affecting the email deliverability.
Well, in order to collect genuine email addresses, it is essential for marketers to go for double opt-in method. Let the people think twice before they subscribe to your emails. This will make sure that you have a genuine database, and will reduce your list churn rate.
2) Attempt Re-engagement emails for inactives
The group of people that fall into the Opaque churn category are inactive due to various reasons. Either your emails are not being delivered to their inboxes or they might not be interested in your emails anymore.
Nevertheless, try sending re-engagement emails to subscribers who don’t even open your emails. Consider providing them with some incentive such as: free shipping, discounts, and so on. If you are able to engage the recipients with your re-engagement emails, your list churn rate should come down substantially.
3) Preference center for users to manage their subscription
Nothing could be as great as getting things customized for yourself, just like subway ;). Even in emails, if you let your recipients choose their preference; your list churn rate will automatically reduce drastically.
Create a preference center, and let the users decide what they want to receive based on their interest. Give them an option of selecting how many emails would they like to receive. By doing so, you are automatically sending emails as preferred by your subscribers, and chances of unsusbcription reduce. At the end of the day you don’t want your subscribers to leave you, isn’t it?
4) Send Triggered E-Mails Through Segmenting & Targeting
Segment your database into subgroups based on their interests. Send Triggered emails based on the interest of your subscribers, it works well for your email campaigns. So, if a set of people in your database is interested in receiving sports related items, there is no point sending them an email related to recipes. Irrelevant and badly timed emails will increase your list churn rate, beware and follow the best practices.
5) Subscribers’ feedback is essential
Find out what does your subscriber think about your organization. This activity may not help you reduce your churn rate directly, but if you take the feedback of your subscriber, while he is unsubscribing from your emails, it will help you manage your future campaigns and email list well.
6) Maintain the right frequency of Emails
Sending too many or too less emails is not advisable. Be crisp with the frequency of sending emails. If you send too many emails to your subscribers, they might unsubscribe from your emails. On the other hand, if you send too less emails, your subscribers may tend to forget about you.
Takeaways
• Try collecting your email database using double opt-in method for genuine email addresses.
• Sending triggered emails based on the interest of your subscribers will certainly reduce the list churn rate.
• Let the subscribers decide what they want to receive by building a preference center.
• Maintain the right frequency of emails to reduce the churn rate.