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Engagement Can Improve Email Marketing Performance — Here’s How

Chip LaFleur

Summary

Email Marketing Means Sending as Many Emails as Possible, Right? Absolutely not.  Best practices change quickly in the digital marketing world, and sending emails to more contacts to cast the widest net possible is an outdated and ineffective strategy. Just a few years ago, spamming people’s email was the go-to tactic. If you indiscriminately sent an email to 1,000 people and 5%…

Engagement Can Improve Email Marketing Performance — Here’s How

Email Marketing Means Sending as Many Emails as Possible, Right?

Absolutely not. 

Best practices change quickly in the digital marketing world, and sending emails to more contacts to cast the widest net possible is an outdated and ineffective strategy. Just a few years ago, spamming people’s email was the go-to tactic. If you indiscriminately sent an email to 1,000 people and 5% took action, you could increase your effectiveness tenfold by sending the same message to 10,000 people. 

But it was still spam. And it doesn’t work anymore. 

Learn More About How LaFleur Handles Email Marketing

Quality Is Job 1 With Email Marketing: Here’s Why You Only Want to Send Emails to Engaged Contacts

Today, email and internet providers care more about the quality of the sender and the quality of email content. Why? Because they want to deliver the most relevant and important messages to their users — and they want to avoid delivering spam, viruses, and other unwanted messages. 

This isn’t just theoretical. Data from every one of our clients shows that deliverability, engagement, and conversions increase as you improve the quality of your list. 

We recently tweaked one client’s newsletter recipient list to focus on more engaged contacts. Here are the results: 

By cutting this client’s email newsletter list by over 70%, we were able to: 

  • Raise the delivery rate by over 5%
  • Nearly double the raw number of clicks
  • Raise the click rate nearly 600%
  • More than double the open rate
  • Reduce unsubscribes
  • Maintain an acceptably low level of spam complaints

By sending to fewer, more engaged contacts, every single metric for their email marketing improved. 

It seems counterintuitive: Why would sending to less people actually mean more people engage with your emails? The reason is quality. The higher quality your list, the better your emails will perform. 

Here at LaFleur, we have applied this same approach across the board for our clients with outstanding results. And we have taken an even harsher policy for our own email marketing. 

We have cut our newsletter list from over 10,000 recipients down to approximately 400. If you want to join that exclusive list, you can subscribe here: 

The results? Here are a few of the numbers from our last email newsletter:

  • 99.7% delivery rate
  • 53.67% open rate
  • 2.05% click rate
  • 2 conversions

RELATED: Email Marketing Basics: List Building and Growth

But What About All the Other People in My Email Marketing List?

You don’t have to neglect all your contacts with lower engagement. Instead, you can send emails to them less frequently with higher value messaging. 

For example, here at LaFleur, we send out a quarterly re-engagement campaign to all of our contacts. These campaigns feature new ebooks, infographics, or other resources. Sometimes they promote a giveaway. Other times, they include a special offer. The possibilities for enticing your audience to interact with your brand are only limited by your imagination. 

Then, if a user engages with one or more emails in a re-engagement campaign, they will automatically get upgraded to our highly engaged list and begin receiving more frequent messaging. 

How Do You Manage Complicated Email Marketing Lists?

Here at LaFleur, we have powerful email marketing software and tools that allow us to capture user data, assign values to the actions users take, dynamically update contact lists based on rules and programming logic, and much more.

Learn More About Marketing Automation

When most clients come to us, they realize the importance of email marketing. They understand that email has an extremely high return on investment. They know they should stay in touch with their followers, clients, peers, and media contacts.

They just don’t have the time to do it right.

That’s why LaFleur is here. We can handle all of your email marketing needs. From cleaning up and organizing your contact records to writing, designing, and sending multiple-email campaigns on behalf of your brand, we’ve got you covered.

Call (888) 222-1512 or fill out a brief form on our contact page. We’d love to have a conversation about how we can help you reach more people, improve the quality of your email marketing, and save time.

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