“Email is King!” It’s all about marketing. Right?
Yes and no.
Email marketing is crucial to every online business but if your list doesn’t get managed, maintained and manicured… then unfortunately all that hard work could be going to waste—and you could be losing money.
First impressions matter. But make it quick!
The sheer amount of emails being sent out is overwhelming.
Most inboxes (and their owners) are suffering from email overload.
In fact, you now only have around six seconds to capture someone’s attention on the web.
And that’s rapidly decreasing, along with our attention span—so there is no time for mistakes.
But as we find ourselves under constant pressure to write more, and faster than ever, it’s easy to fall victim to settling for quantity over quality.
And in the rush to put out new articles, posts and product updates every day or week, technicalities tend to slip through your fingers.
Won’t you stick around a while longer?
Deliverability is the first step in email’s journey to the consumer’s inbox and it is crucial.
Your deliverability depends on:
- Bounce rates,
- IP address reputation,
- Reader engagement/ spam complaints” and
- Being blacklisted.
Your ESP uses these metrics to see whether you’re doing things right or you’re a shady bastard.
When people stop opening your emails, it gets penalized in the rankings because this signals to your ESP that you’re not trustworthy.
This means a clean list is a must if you want to own a powerful marketing channel.
Beyond monitoring spam complaints, ESPs are calculating opens, clicks, unsubscribes, inactivity and more into the algorithms that decide inbox placement.
And permission to send emails does not last forever, even the most engaged subscribers can lose interest as time passes, which can mean they become more of a liability than an asset.
Can poor list hygiene really cost companies millions?
So, aside from:
- Negative Brand Perception = Decrease in Revenue
- Lowered Expectations = Increased Churn
- Irrelevant Content = Decreased Engagement
- Failed Communication = Increased Customer Acquisition Cost & inability to activate signups into repeat buyers
… Just what is the financial impact of a neglected list?
Let’s say you have 500k email subscribers, 15% of which are “repeat buyers” spending $100 annually.
Let’s also assume that the average cost to acquire and annually service a “repeat buyer” through paid and organic channels is $15. Your Average Customer Value (ACV) is $85 for the first year. That’s your return on investment from one customer.
The short-term consequence of poor list management is that it creates a lack of interest.
A customer won’t unsubscribe because you sent one irrelevant email, but it throws a bad karma on your brand.
Now, imagine that you send 4 emails every week, and 3 of them are not relevant to your reader causing the user to unsubscribe.
OK…
A good unsubscribe rate for this list size is less than 0.5%. So let’s be conservative and say that 0.25% of total unsubscribes were attributed to to irrelevant emails, over the course of the year.
You have churned over 14,591 subscribers, of which 2,189 (15%) were “repeat buyers”.
Here’s the cost:
- You spent $32,829 to acquire those 2,189 customers.
- Over the course of 12 months, with an attributable 0.25% churn each month, you just lost an additional $112,497 in “recurring” revenue.
And that’s not including the cost of acquiring and then failing to activate the 12,402 users not classified as “repeat buyers”.
Simple back-of-napkin calculations shows that the cost to acquire could be around $11,000 and the cost of not activating them could be in excess of $1M.
You’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $145,326) of investment and revenue. You’ve also lost access to a key channel through which you could have fostered strong relationships.
Customers have lots of options online, and we know that there will be other brands waiting to claim the consumer mindshare you’ve forfeited.
Sending good emails is just got more affordable than ever before
Short-term errors aren’t lethal but they are still harmful. Readers can’t help but hone in on another irrelevant message you’re trying to make. It’s just the way we’re wired.
Luckily, the solution is simple. Having a trained copywriter can protect your reputation and boost sales, helping you avoid embarrassing—and expensive—mistakes.
Remember, nobody wants to give their hard-earned cash to someone who doesn’t care enough to supply them with relevant and valuable knowledge. It’s as simple as that.
y’all coming for supper or what?
Katja Mokotar
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Katja Mokotar is a professional email Copywriter. She creates email strategies for CPG eCommerce that generate new & repeat customers… and can often be scaled to $1M and beyond.