Can everyone on your email marketing list make this statement? If not, then you shouldn’t be emailing them. This is true for two big reasons, the first of which is CAN-SPAM, enough said. The second is that your emails should be a service for your customers, a service they want. If you are emailing customers who don’t want to be on your list then you may be actively driving them away.
So how do we solve this problem? One other thing you can do is to send a re-subscription email out to those who haven’t been responding. It’s basically sending them an email that explicitly presents them with a unsubscribe link.
You don’t need to unsubscribe them automatically, but you give them the chance to remove themselves. So let’s go ahead and build out this email.
First let’s identify our audience, we want to send this email out to people who haven’t opened an email or clicked a link in while. Bronto users can easily do this on the Clean tab (within the Contacts tab). There you can create a list of contacts who have made no opens or clicks for the last X emails. There are a number of options for how far back this should go (see right); the counts shown on this page are a good guide for making your decision.- Now we need to craft an email. This contact hasn’t opened the email in some time, so the subject line needs to be compelling, for example you can term this as an invitation, “We’d like to invite you back.”
- In the body the email should be relatively simple, with the standard look and feel of your mailings. The key information to place here is a link to your website and a reminder of the purpose and value of your mailing. Remember to place a manage subscription link within the body or directly refer to the unsubscribe link in the footer.
All of this empowers your customer to unsubscribe if your email is no longer relevant to them. If it is still relevant, it can help to re-engage with the customer. For those customers who continue to not open or click, it is advisable to remove these users from your list.
At the end of the day, you are best served to keep a clean list. Customers who are no longer interested will eventually grow annoyed by continued attempts to contact them via email. It’s tempting to keep around as many contacts as you can, but it’s the active, interested customers that you want to be reaching out to.
Update: There was a question about how to place the manage url into your message, you can make use of the %%!manage_url%% or %%!unsubscribe_url%% tags. You can easily place them in the message via the rich text editor by typing in some text for the link, highlighting that text, then click on the link button. Once in the link pop-up, select <other> for the protocol and then enter the token in the URL field.
Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Adam,
Where do I get my “manage preferences” and “unsubscribe) addresses to put in the email. Those that would go immediately to the persons already populated preferences and the unsubscribe that would do it right away…?
Thanks
Tom
It would be nice if Bronto would add triggers to do this automatically.
I guess this blog doesn’t get read very often?
Hi Tom –
Here’s a blog post describing the Manage Preferences URL and the Direct Unsubscribe URL that you would put in your message.
http://blog.bronto.com/bronto_updates/2007/04/bronto_update_a.html (Edit: link updated, sorry about that)
It’s about halfway down in the post.
If you have any questions about those, feel free to contact us. Thanks!
The Bronto Support Team
Sorry about that, Tom, I didn’t have the notifications set up properly. As was mentioned by support there is a blog entry about that (see the updated link). I have also updated the post above to show a tip for easily getting the manage link into your message. I hope that helps, thanks for the great question.
I just sent out one of these emails, and have some comments.
I do think it is a good idea… but…
As I am sure you know, there are a bunch of different ways that someone who reads the emails might not be “captured”. So when you send an email to people who are supposedly not reading it, you will be sending out the email to a large number of loyal customers. I was aware of this and made mention of it in my email.
I would suggest others make a similar point of saying - “hey, you might actually be reading emails on a regular basis and we’re just not capturing that. If so, you do not need to respond to this email!”
I put that in there and have still received over 50 emails (and counting) from customers begging me not to unsubscribe them. Which I never said I would do automatically anyway.
Which brings up the question of, as software gets more advanced at blocking your ability to track them, what can you do to improve your tracking?
Anyway, I don’t mind loyal customers getting the email and getting a little panicked. It got them thinking for sure. I just don’t have time to deal with all of the influx as a result.
Todd,
Thanks for the update, and for making a good point. It *is* very important to warn these customers that they will continue to receive your emails if they take no action.
With respect to open tracking, that has always been an inexact science. Right now there are a few methods which work quite often, and they are broadly used. There is a movement within the industry to find good methods for verifying senders. Once a sender is verified, blocking images is less important. However, the main problem is that there are too many competing ideas for verification.
At Bronto, we take part in those that we can, for example, we use MSN/Hotmail’s SenderId and if you check the “Enable Reply Tracking / Domain Keys” option when sending your email you will enable the use of Yahoo!’s Domain Keys (DKIM).
Moving forward we will continue to take advantage of new ways to improve the deliverability of your messages and accuracy of your reports.