Say Goodbye to Your Email List
It might sound mad to automatically unsubscribe your entire email contact list, but it could be the best way to ensure the willingness of those remaining customers to stay loyal and make a purchase.
Recently, Dr Martens sent out an email to their subscribers with the subject line “Your last stage call” and the visible first line “Before we cross you off the list”. As a short subject heading it stands out among the much longer subject headings typical to social and promotional email, and gives the customer a very strong incentive to open the email.
On opening the email customers are greeted with “Moved on? Don't worry, we'll cross your name off the list. But you'll lose exclusive DM's community privileges...”.The message is persuasive without being aggressive, and goes on to ask the recipient to reconfirm their subscription, should they want to. Customers who do confirm their subscription are taken to a landing page with links to the main product categories but there is no hard sell.
As a tactic this is very clever. It not only ensures that you only have interested parties in your email list, but it brings all those people onto your website as a consequence of expressing their interest. Because the customer feels that they are the ones in charge of this decision they are more likely to have a quick browse and even put something in their baskets as a result. This email campaign was sent on a Sunday when consumers are at leisure and more likely to be thinking about shopping for shoes than on a Wednesday morning when it's all work, work, work.
Compared to a similar email campaign asking people to click to unsubscribe it is much more effective at actually driving sales; people who click to express disinterest aren't then going to browse your website or think about buying something. It might seem a little risky, but if you have a large list with a high proportion of inactive and unresponsive subscribers it doesn't make sense to keep targeting these people when they are never going to respond.
One huge advantage to cutting the dead weight from your email list is that it gives you a chance to analyse and segment your data afresh. You may have been creating email campaigns based around the demographics and interests of your email list contacts, led in a particular direction by the data. If a significant chunk of the list doesn't confirm their subscription then there's a good chance that the demographic profiles of your list have shifted.
Look at your segments and cohorts again and see whether you can refresh or completely revamp your messaging. Sometimes an entirely new angle will be appropriate, or you may find that your confirmed list is mostly active at a certain time of day, telling you the best time to communicate with them. There are many benefits to willingly letting go of your unresponsive email list contacts.
You can easily grow your list again with a new subscriber discount on their first purchase, with the promise of a rewards system or other value-added content that will be of interest to your target market. Don't let the fear of losing out stop you from taking a drastic step when it is needed – by adding new subscribers you'll get your numbers back up with people who have recently interacted with you. If you want a better quality email list, this is a very compelling way of achieving that goal.
