Avoid the open rate death spiral

Last week I gave some pointers about how to write — and test — email subject lines, one of the two most important factors influencing email open rates. The other? Maintaining a clean, engaged list of contacts. In today’s newsletter, I’ll share how to run a reengagement campaign that can dramatically improve open rates.

But first… I never really got into why open rates matter. Sure, you want your emails to be opened and your reporting to be read. Not to mention those marketing emails that help power your journalism. But the impact of a plummeting open rate goes far beyond the individual who did or did not open an email. It can determine the fate of all future emails.

We often talk about email as the anti-social network; a way to reach readers directly, on your own terms, and unbeholden to fickle algorithms. That’s not exactly true. Email platforms do use algorithms to help readers sort through cluttered inboxes. These algorithms send personal and important emails to your primary inbox, and send others elsewhere. Google is the most notorious with its Promotions and Updates tabs; Outlook has “Other,” and they all have a Spam bin.

Powering this decision-making is your sender reputation, a score that looks at the sender’s history. Does it send a lot of emails no one opens? Do a lot of people mark it as spam or unsubscribe? Are their emails bouncing a lot?

If your list has a history of low open rates, all of your emails are less likely to go into a highly visible inbox, and more likely to go to a secondary folder or spam bin. That lower visibility means even new contacts are less likely to see your emails, further depressing open rates. That is what I call the open-rate death spiral.

The best way to avoid that death spiral is to keep a clean list of engaged contacts, and remove people who don’t open emails. To make sure you don’t remove anyone who truly wants to be there, you can send reengagement emails to give them a “last chance” to take action.

This is called a reengagement campaign. BlueLena rolls these out for our publishers when requested. Here’s how they work:

• Identify the unengaged segment: This can be contacts who have never opened an email, or who haven’t opened in a specific amount of time like the last six months.
• Send a series of emails: The emails should be short and make very clear that if they take no action, they’ll be removed from the list. We include a button they can click, but really the action is opening the email. The emails should remind them of who you are, how they signed up, and what you’ve been up to lately that might pique their interest. We have templates for this!
• Remove unengaged contacts: We recommend unsubscribing them. These email addresses have little value, except inflating your list numbers and the fees you pay for email service. A less severe option? We can add a tag and exclude them from your newsletter sends.

That’s it! Doing this simple routine will improve your deliverability and open rates — and there are two big revenue reasons to prioritize this. First, you’ll keep your ESP fees down because you won’t be charged for unresponsive email contacts. Second, and more importantly, subscribers will be likelier to see your emails prominently in their inboxes, and your marketing emails will be more effective since they’ll reach more people. If you have a bad sender reputation today, once you turn it around I’m confident you’ll see higher response rates to your messages about donation, membership or subscriptions.

BlueLena builds reengagement campaigns as a one-time cleaning, or an ongoing automation that’s always scrubbing the list. Email support@bluelena.io and we’ll handle the hard stuff.

Read more:

• How to Use Email to Re-Engage Sleepy Subscribers
• Everything Marketers Need to Know About Sender Scores
• What’s Creeping in Your Email List?