Every email marketer’s goal is to send their most effective content to contacts actively engaging with their brand. Now, that’s the goal, but what happens when you see open rates decline, spam rates increase, or just a general lack of engagement from your audience? It’s critical for marketers to understand not only who is engaging with their email but also to suppress those who have unsubscribed or are no longer active in the inbox. This is where a combination of open data and suppression list management can make a major difference in your email marketing success.
How does having a suppression list management platform make an impact?
Let’s say you have suppression lists across three platforms, those lists need to be synced on a daily or weekly basis. The CAN-SPAM Act says, “You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days.” So, if you sync these unsubscribes every 9 days you are compliant, but as a consumer, in this day and age, most believe the opt-out will be honored immediately at the click of the unsubscribe button or link. This is where having a suppression list management platform that can centralize subscriber preferences and sync between platforms has a lot of value.
Sure, your company could assign the task of manually updating all unsubscribes to an employee, and some do, but one unsubscribe slipping through the cracks puts your brand’s reputation at risk. That’s why having a platform like Unsubcentral to automate data synchronization and give you monitoring, reporting, and alerts when something fails, is so crucial to a marketing program.
For tips on suppression list management, visit our blog Three Email Marketing Unsubscribe Risk Management Tips.
What is open data?
Open data is, well, data on all email opening activity in a given email inbox. That’s right, it doesn’t just illustrate opens for a single brand or company – it provides general open activity. This means that if you notice a contact isn’t opening your email anymore, it doesn’t mean they’re automatically a bad lead. They might be opening other emails and just not yours! This can be due to email fatigue, a recent purchase, or just general disenchantment with your brand and its messaging.
By incorporating open data technology into your CRM, you can identify those who are still opening emails and create a highly effective re-engagement campaign for that contact. Maybe it’s a discount code or a special offer based on their last purchase location? Something to re-engage and active email is better than nothing.
Why combine open data and automated suppression technology?
Combining open data and automated suppression list technology helps ensure two things:
- You’re sending emails to active inboxes
- You’re suppressing truly inactive emails to protect your brands reputation
And these two components make for great email marketing program results. To start, you have the opportunity to create fantastic re-engagement campaigns that convert previously inactive contacts to engaged customers. This then leads to better open rates, an optimized email marketing list, and better segmentation. At the same time, you’re ensuring you don’t waste time nor effort sending to inactive or disinterested contacts because the automated suppression list platform removes them from your send lists.
Overall, the streamlined communication between departments, CRMs, and contact records thanks to open data and automated suppression list technology help email marketers see a greater ROI from their efforts. It’s no small feat to maintain a successful email marketing program but sending to a clean list of active emails while your suppression list is consistently updated virtually guarantees better results to bring to your next Marketing meeting.
For more information on open data services, visit the TowerData website.