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If people don't respond to your email don't just accept it!
If people on your house list don’t respond to your offer don’t just accept it – here is how to increase your response rates.

Email Marketers are generally happy these days with a 2% click thru rate on a campaign to a rented list and 6-10% on a house list.

What about the other 90% that did not respond in any way?

Typically we can break it down as follows:

  • 10% bounce rate (even the most clean and up-to-date lists will have this due to temporary server problems at the recipients end, or people that have left their company or changed their email address)
  • 7% of people on holiday – this is an average figure and is obviously higher during the peak seasons. People are less likely to respond when they get back in the office or check their email at home because of the volume of messages they will initially see.
  • This leaves 73% of your list not responding!

The reason they did not respond to your offer is so simple but often overlooked – they just were not interested enough.

Therefore why not change your offer and send it to those that did not respond?

An example of this would be:

A holiday company sends out an email to their house list highlighting there holidays with free airport parking and a personal taxi to their hotel to target those that are looking for the hassle and hidden expense to be taken away from their holiday.

A second email is sent to those that didn’t respond with a special offer offering money off the holidays that appeals to another segment of their market who are more price driven.

In each instance a response rate of just over 7% was achieved, doubling the click-thru’s and sales generated from sending a single email message.

Best practice of course would be to carry out one-to-one marketing techniques by using all of the information in their CRM database to profile these customers – but how many companies have this information, particularly with the house lists they have built from website subscriptions? The company above knows the different types of customers in the market; they just don’t know where each of their customers fits into this.

Of course using systems like Maxemail with its profile page facility can help you get to the point of true one-to-one marketing but the main thing is a change in business processes and attitudes of front line staff – something which is not a straightforward or quick process.

In the meantime you need to get the most of your house list by varying what you send – and here is a practical guide on how to achieve it.

Step 1
We would recommend 1 week after you have sent the campaign to create and send the second campaign. Using software such as Maxemail allows you to produce a list of not only those who responded but those that didn’t.

Step 2
Create 2 lists – those that opened but did not respond and those that simply did not open the email. With those that did open but not click-thru create a new offer and send. With those that did not open the email change the ‘from’ address and subject line to encourage people to open it.

Step 3
If you have the facility to profile your customers, use the results to do this. What type of products are they interested in? What price level products are they generally looking at?

It is as simple as that to potentially double your response rates!