Lessons Learned from our eNewsletter Cleanup
Just a quick note to our Downtown Women's Club members. A subset of you received an email message from us yesterday re: your interest in staying on our mailing list. A database cleanup is something we've meant to undertake for a while. The old adage is that every year 10% of your distribution list is out of date. We've been collecting addresses through our email newsletter service since 2004. Which means we have hundreds of out of date addresses.
This number could be even larger thanks to the recession. Many of our members used work email addresses and each month for the past year we've gotten increasingly larger "no longer works here" email responses. On top of that, our website got hit with some spammers last year who would do auto-robot signups of our newsletter (that issue was corrected, but not before several hundred fake email addresses were added).
Now, this isn't really a huge problem other than to clog up our main customer service email on newsletter day. However, our email newsletter service charges us by the size of the database. If we reduce the bad addresses by a couple thousand, we drop down to a lower rate.
The bad news is the only way we had to sort through this issue was to send an email to a subgroup of the list that the email newsletter service could identify as "not opening an email from us in the past four months."
The good news is that we got a larger response back from our members than we expected! I wish I could personally respond to all the friendly notes people added. They made our day last night as we started sorting through them. But, we did learn the following things which might be of use to others.
Lessons learned from our email newsletter cleanup:
1. Subject lines matter. I'm glad that at the last minute I changed to header of that email to "We hope we haven't been boring you!" from "Please confirm your interest ... " or whatever lame header we had initially used. Many people commented that it was the subject line that got them to open it AND that in the past they've opened only those newsletters where the subject line interested them.
2. E-Newsletters services have a lot of good data. While we always had above average open and click through rates, we could could see that a lot of info was not getting through. We could also see which newsletters had the highest open rates (our Network Now! eNewsletter for paid DWC+ members) and what items were the most clicked through (any articles about networking, fashion or books).
3. E-Newsletters services can't track all "opens." We heard from a lot of people who said they read the newsletter on Outlook or a smartphone without having to "open" it. The email newsletter service also notes that it can't track TEXT only eNewsletters (note that most email services now can handle HTML so many of our "aol.com" users who had been getting text versions can now switch that in the subscriber options at the bottom of any email you receive from us or others). We knew this was likely the case and that's why we sent out the email to confirm who our "live addresses" were rather than just drop the non-opens. This is time-consuming on our end, but we were THRILLED to hear from such a large group.
4. Some people like to be asked if they could remain on the list. In a world where people add any name they can to any distribution list (and often send emails without an "unsubscribe" option), I recalled that I've really liked the people who checked in to see if I would like to remain on their list. I almost never say no, and often I ask them to change my address to my newsletter/shopping only one so it doesn't clog up my business email.
5. We were able to answer a lot of non-newsletter related questions. Some customer service questions came up about membership, resources, affiliate programs and starting new clubs. We are taking the time to respond to these too (although it may take us a few days!). We even got a bunch of new paid members as a result!
6. "Out of office" messages are a good thing. Even if someone is away, we are counting the out-of-office messages as live addresses (unless they are a "no longer works here" response).
7. The DWC bottom line for this project. As a small business, we have to watch every single cost. We stand to save a couple thousand dollars over the next two years and we have all of you who responded to our email yesterday to thank for that!
Thanks for sharing this. I did open the email yesterday because the subject line was so good!
I may have to do this for my own business!
Paula Harris
www.whcornerstone.com
Posted by: Paula Harris | July 14, 2010 at 09:31 AM