Marketing Email: Avoid Emailing Dead Accounts

By Madison Jacobs
Part 3 of the “4 Reasons Why Your Emails Aren’t Opened” series

This is part 3 on a series of posts on the 4 reasons why the marketing email you are sending isn’t getting opened by your subscribers.

In part 2 of the series, I covered why having a bad subject line that isn’t interesting and relevant to the content within the body of your email can be a huge factor in why your emails aren’t getting read.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the 3^rd reason why your emails may not be getting opened – you’re emailing dead accounts.

Emailing Dead Accounts
According to the 2012 National Client Email Report by the Direct Marketing Association, 51 percent of email marketers spent at least 10 percent of their marketing budget on emailing their lists. 20 percent of marketers spent 40% or even more on their email marketing budget.

Wow. Now, imagine if you were spending close to 50 percent of your marketing budget just on sending emails alone and a quarter of the emails you were sending were going to dead or secondary email accounts that weren’t reaching anyone. Ouch.

People tend to switch email addresses every few years. They usually do this to get away from all of the SPAM emails they begin to receive over time.

If your email open rates seem low, you could be sending messages to abandoned or secondary email accounts.

To fix this, consider using an alternative follow-up campaign (phone, direct mail, social media) to remind people to update their contact information and re-opt in to your marketing messages.
Disciplined marketing email strategies play off when you have a truly engaged, interested list. You always want to make sure you are sending your emails to the people who really matter.



In part 2 of this series, I will dive into making sure you avoid emailing dead accounts.
What is an example of a subject line you used on an email that got high open rates? Let us know below!

 

Pay close attention to your open rates and always make sure you are doing everything you can to ensure that the accounts you are emailing are active.

In the final part of this series, I will talk about how emailing at the wrong time of the day can negatively affect your open rates.

What follow-up campaigns do you use to make sure the email addresses you are sending your marketing messages to are active accounts? Let us know below!

Craft the perfect email message by taking tips from “The Anatomy of an Email” ebook.