Today's question of the day is, "Do you clean up your marketing/customer lists?"
From first-hand experience, list clean-up can be a tedious and time-consuming process. It can also be essential in maximizing the results of your marketing campaigns.
How so?
Take a great ad and send it to a lousy marketing list; your results are going to be poor. Juxtapose the previous variables against a high-quality list with mediocre marketing. Your high-quality list with sub-par marketing will outperform almost every time.
Here's an email list cleaning example from a recent project involving a large outdoor event in the United States.
In total, the event has a high-quality contact database for over 60,000 people. During a recent email marketing analysis, the following came to light.
Over the last two years:
7,000 contacts did NOT open any marketing emails, and approximately 40,000 contacts OPENED at least one marketing email.
If you haven't already, add up the numbers above and take note. Specifically, the 40,000 people who opened an email and 7,000 that did not open an email. Those numbers total up to 47,000 contacts on a list of over 60,000. Unfortunately, it also leaves us with a gap of over 13,000 marketing contacts.
How is that gap possible?
It's essential to remember that even if your email service provider indicates an open, it doesn't mean that's technically accurate. With people using pop-up blockers and privacy tools, tracking open rates is becoming more challenging. The same word of caution also needs to be applied to those contacts who didn't open your emails.
Here's where a lot of the tedious list clean-up work could come back to haunt us ...
On the surface, one could easily justify deleting the contact information for the 13,000 "did not opens" in the example above.
That is until you find out that almost 10% of the people on the "did not open" list are also customers with an average transaction value of $140 USD.
Put in other words, $140 x 1000 = $140,000 USD of customer data that could be easily deleted.
Remember, just because you can quickly delete something doesn't mean you should. You must have a series of checks and balances to guide the cleaning of your marketing lists. Always be willing to dig deeper!
Want to get more advice using a list to promote your event? Check out the links below: