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Email Abandonment.

Posted on December 18th, 2007 by Simon Chen

I was speaking with a marketing manager today and we were discussing her CEO’s concern regarding a recent collaborative email broadcast we conducted for them last week, with another client. Never mind the detail. Here’s the crux of it.

The CEO was concerned at the high level of “undeliverable” emails and also “unsubscribes”.

We drilled into their email client and immediately saw the problem.

The last email prior to last Thursday’s broadcast was sent out on the 30th September this year. The one prior to that in April. So, their sum total of their email marketing efforts came to a whopping total of 3 broadcasts. For their entire year.
It can’t be that hard - can it?

This company has a database of some 30,000 people. Predominantly women. All active buyers of their product. They are “ripe” for marketing. And in this time poor, cash rich environment, are for the most part, screaming out for more convenient ways to buy and interract.

3 emails in a year won’t cut it. It’s hardly what you would call “engagement” is it? May as well not do anything. You’ll always get undeliverable rates in excess of 15% of the total base if you keep this up. And single digit click thru rates.

Why?

Because your customer has forgotten you. Period.

I think way too many people within the email marketing industry get too carried away with throwing a large bucketful of metrics at their clients, all the while forgetting one key element. Clients then rave about CTR’s (click thru rates), open rates, subscribe method, follow up totals, etc etc.

If you ask me - there are only 2 real metrics that matter. Frequency. And Conversion.  How often do you communicate with your email base and much do they buy when you do?

PS. I couldn’t find the right image to put in this post. I wanted to use this, but I thought it might offend some folks.

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    This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 5:47 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    One Response to “Email Abandonment.”

    1. David Gillespie Says:
      December 19th, 2007 at 10:13 am

      Simon, good to have you back blogging. We’ve certainly noticed a difference in our site stats going out twice a month as opposed to once a month (thanks for the prompt there!). Probably a good move not directly displaying the Gaping Void cartoon, the point is none the less valid =]

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