Zombie email subscribers could be dragging your list down

Zombies seem to be popular these days and make for great entertainment. Yet, it’s not all fun and games when they show up at your business. Although you can’t totally zombie-proof your company, don’t panic!

One of the most valuable assets a business has is their email contact list. And there’s a very good chance that inactive email subscribers” are haunting you --depressing your open rates and hurting your reputation.

Zombies don’t open your emails. Never. Ever. Like they don’t exist.

Your email list is like having a stack of gold bars, but only if your subscribers are engaged and active.

Perhaps great content attracted visitors to your website and they became subscribers to your email newsletter or blog. Or people you met at a trade show allowed you to scan their badge and collect their contact information, or maybe the chamber of commerce you belong to has a member’s list published online and you helped yourself to it.

Email zombies are worse than bounced emails -- you at least know a bounced address isn’t valid. For some reason these people are not engaged with your company. For them, it’s as if you don’t exist.

It turns out that having these people hang around on your list is a big deal, and not in a good way.

Popular email service providers such as Gmail know how active your subscribers are and will decide to place your email blast either into the inbox or the junk folder. Google may not have access to your overall open rate, but they can indeed tell who opens the emails that are sent through their own service.

No active engagement means your wonderful email content, campaigns, and call-to-actions lower your response rate. It becomes a vicious cycle of lower and lower open rates. You get frustrated and sell less.

Sending high quality content to people who have chosen to receive content from you is the hallmark of great email marketing. Yet, you need to do more to engage and interact with your subscribers.

Zombies are lurking in your email list and you don’t know it. They are killing your profits and here’s what you can do about it.

Permission to come aboard. Either you received “permission” to add a person to your email list or no consent was ever given. There is no in-between. Permission is easy to get in most cases. People can opt-in by signing up for your company’s newsletter. Or when handed a business card at a networking meeting you ask to add them to your email list and if they agree, you’ll send out education material relevant to them and occasional offers too. But, people who suddenly start receiving emails from a business that never had permission to do so will either keep deleting, unsubscribe, or worse of all, mark them as spam to the email service provider! These are obvious zombies and you need to get them engaged or dropped from your email list before the harm is done.

Get your subscriber lists engaged, now. Some email services say that as much as 40% of your list may be zombies, seemingly permanently unengaged. Even the folks that gave you permission to add them to your email list can turn into zombies. The level of engagement (the ratio of opens and clicks over a period of time) is easy to track. Look for trends, such as which headlines and campaigns produced the most opens and clicks to your landing page. Once you know that, start testing similar tactics. Also, segment you list into categories based on what’s relevant to your business -- product or service purchased, seminar or webinar attended, report downloaded, and so on. Tailor subject lines, solid content, and your call-to-action to them. Also segment an overlay list by open rate and break the different levels of engagement into subdivisions -- very active (opened 3 plus times in last ninety days), engaged (opened at least once in last ninety days), not engaged (no opens in the last three to six months), zombies (never opened in the last twelve months or more).

Hello, are you still there? Now that you’ve gone zombie hunting and segmented your lists, send an occasional scrubbing email. To everyone, except people on the above “very active” list, about every ninety days send a re-confirmation email. Ask if they still want to hear from your company and as part of that include a really great offer, an amazing piece of educational content, or a survey to get their feedback. Unsubscribe anyone on the zombie list that doesn’t reply within ten or twenty days. You just might get permission from someone who hadn’t previous given it to you and engage them, but most importantly you’ll begin to clean up your list and say goodbye to harmful subscribers including people that left a job and never had their email removed. Consider setting up a custom confirmation page with a thank you with a free download of valuable content.

Think about it; do you know how many people you send email updates to of some type to and never, ever open them up? It’s time to find out and re-engage your zombies -- or get rid of them.

An email subscriber who doesn’t take action isn’t worth much. In fact, zombies can hurt you by affecting your deliverability over time and costing you money.

Ron Stein is President of FastPath Marketing (www.marketing-strategies-guide.com) and the author of the Rapid Impact Marketing & Selling Playbook. As a speaker, coach, and consultant he works with small business owners helping them to accelerate the path between their vision and the actions needed to reach, win, and keep customers. Ron is the creator of the FastPath to More Customers Now! 7-step marketing system based on more than twenty years as a successful business owner, corporate CEO, business development executive, and salesman. He is also a mentor at two nationally recognized business accelerators. Ron offers one-on-one and small group mentoring, conducts seminars, and consults. He can be reached at 727-398-1855 or Ron@FastPathMarketing.com.