Wow, your list is growing, and you are reaching more subscribers than ever! However, it’s common to see your open and click rates decrease as your list size gets larger. So what is the best way to combat this, and make sure your rates remain strong?
Create List Segments
The first step to clean your lists is to organize them into curated segments. Each subscriber is unique in their interests and therefore will respond differently to emails. Create dynamic lists that pull in subscribers by their location, interests, or demographics. This can help you target specific sub-groups with targeted emails, which will help increase the open and click rates for the campaign.
Now, what if you’d like to segment your lists, but you currently don’t have enough personal information about your subscribers? There are a couple things you can do to glean information from your subscribers:
- Send Out a Survey: Create a quick survey in Critical Impact to better understand your audience, and then send it to your list of subscribers and review the results.
- Behavioral Segments: Use dynamic lists to target subscribers who clicked a specific category of link, to segment subscribers based on their past interactions with your emails.
Clean Out Inactive Subscribers
Critical Impact will automatically unsubscribe any hard bounces, that occur when an email address cannot receive email for a permanent reason. This helps automatically clean your list from these bad/inactive subscribers.
In addition, you can also suppress subscribers in your account who haven’t opened a message from you in awhile. So it’s a good idea to use Critical Impact’s dynamic lists to find the subscribers who haven’t opened a message from you in the past year, or who haven’t clicked on a specific category of link. By suppressing these inactive subscribers in future sends, you can help rid your list of some “dead weight” that could be causing your rates to suffer. You can also try to re-engage these subscribers using some of these re-engagement tips, before suppressing them from your lists.
Healthy lists will have subscribers who actively want to hear from you. Improve your sender reputation by cleaning your lists, and sending targeted email campaigns.