"February" comes from the Latin word februum, which means purification, and is named after Februa, a Roman cleansing festival held each year on the 15th of the month. No wonder spring cleaning is an annual ritual come March.
There has certainly been plenty of "purification" happening out there. Whether it's in the form of company bankruptcies, general detox, or corporate housecleaning, systems as well as and organizations are restructuring and, in some cases, undergoing seismic change.
What does it mean? It means challenge, certainly, but also opportunity. For email marketers, it means now is the perfect time to critically re-examine our programs, campaign processes, and messages with a fresh, unbiased eye. Time to sweep away the cobwebs of inefficiency or neglect that might have accumulated in less-scrutinized times.
Yet with teams and budgets shrinking, or at least holding steady, the problem remains the same: Do more (often, with less). Your very survival depends on maintaining or increasing revenue and performance.
The burning question: How—without taking undue risks? The answer: Improve what you have already.
Start from the ground up, making sure your fundamentals are sound. There's no point building on a shaky foundation; now more than ever is the time to shore up. Clearing the clutter in your email marketing not only ensures short-term gains in performance but also strengthens long-term value.
Here are five essential areas of any email marketing program that are worth poking around in. Turn over some rocks, and don't hesitate to dump anything you discover underneath that shouldn't be there. In the spirit of spring, let's do some email cleanup:
1. Permission
If you're like the majority of email marketers, a wide variety of sources contributes subscribers to your list using more than one degree of permission (prechecked box, unchecked box, double opt-in, or even opt-out). There's no time like the present to put a stake in the ground and make your preferred method the new standard. At the very least, audit the sources of new names. Are contributors abiding by the rules?
The greater the degree of permission you use, the stronger your subscriber engagement will be. The consensus at the Email Evolution Conference (EEC) this year was loud and clear. Survey and conference participants voted, and the majority agreed:
- The opt-in box should be unchecked rather than prechecked.
- Double opt-in is favored over single opt-in.
The findings don't necessarily mean there aren't justifiable exceptions to the majority opinion, but they do suggest that email marketers have gained an appreciation for subscriber quality over quantity.
2. Your List
Good email-list hygiene directly affects your deliverability. If you haven't done so before, you should...
- Attempt email-address correction on undeliverable soft bounces after the third failure, and on all hard bounces after the first failed delivery attempt
- Audit both your subscribe and unsubscribe processes to ensure they are working as intended and legally required
- Attempt to reactivate nonresponders at least once every six months for a year before suppressing them from future mailings
- Ensure hard bounces are flagged, added to your opt-out suppression file, and never remailed unless those recipients re-opt-in
Services like those provided by FreshAddress and Return Path are helpful in this area. Do suppress inactive subscribers; but as the EEC survey results also indicate, try at least once a year to get them back in the boat. If they still don't engage, then it's time to say goodbye.