Posted by Wayne Gretsky is famous for saying, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Yet in email marketing, the experts tell us to ‘clean our lists’ every 30 days of anyone who hasn’t opened one of our emails.
They say this will ensure our emails get delivered.
But think about this: Emails you don’t send also don’t get delivered 100% of the time.
And emails that aren’t delivered also aren’t read 100% of the time.
Two things to know about this 30-day rule:
First, if you have good open rates, then you can wait much longer than 30 days to clean your list.
Second, when you clean your main list, don’t delete the email addresses of people who haven’t opened your emails recently.
Instead, transfer them to another list and keep emailing. Then use your own discretion of how often to email this second list, and what to send them to ‘reactivate’ them.
Send out bribes to reacquaint them with your products and services. Ask questions, send personal-looking emails, ask if they still want to hear from you, and just get creative.
The million-dollar marketers do this because it works.
For example, I ignored the emails from a certain marketer in my inbox for 3 whole years. Frankly, I forgot who he was, why I subscribed and what he sold.
I just get too many emails, and so it gets easy to ignore some of them.
Then one day he sent an email which I opened. I liked what he said, so I did a search of my inbox and found hundreds of emails from him.
I read a couple dozen of them, went to his website, and later that day made a $997 purchase from him.
All because he was smart enough not to dump my email address in the waste bin just because I got too busy for awhile to read his emails.
Oh yes, and I’ve made two more purchases from him since then.
Granted, I am likely the exception and not the rule. But if just a small percentage of your so-called ‘dead’ list were to reactivate and make a purchase like I did, what would that mean for your bottom line?