Managing Email List Fatigure

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Email marketers are scared of one main thing:  unsubsribes!  Growing a brand and an email audience without overwhelming that audience is a delicate balance and one that takes great strategy.  We know, too, that no email list is immune to people unsubscribing.  However, avoiding unsubscribes and actually getting people to sign up is a magical thing in email marketing.  And when that happens, amazing things can happen with your marketing because people are actually seeing your messages!

Email fatigue doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen in today’s culture, and actually more than you might think!  Let’s take a quick look at how email fatigue happens.

  1. You email the wrong audience.  Sending information or offers to people who care nothing about the industry you’re in, quickly leads to list fatigue.  Their patience for your messages is already really low simply because they don’t personally care about the industry in general; why would they care about YOUR take on that industry?  Let’s say you have an audience of computer programmers that are used to getting information about software releases and techie announcements, and you take that list and start promoting auto sales to them.  Your drop rate is going to be huge!  Know your audience and market to the right audience.
  2. Emailing too often.  List fatigue happens most frequently from over-emailing.  Are you sending daily emails to your audience and getting major unsubscribes?  Perhaps cool it off to once a week emails.  Give your audience a chance to marinate over the first message you send and process through it.  Then, they are okay with getting another email from you a week later.
  3. Relevance!  Are you relevant?  Email offers or newsletter lists that have useful offers or information have solid strength, vs. tiring our the audience right away.  Also, even if said audience is getting tired of the frequency of your emails, if you are providing perceived value, they will stick with you.

So, what can you do to deal with list fatigue?  We’ll tell you right now that the answer is not to send out more emails!

  • Go back to the data!  Watching the stats for any decrease in engagement is a key symptom of list fatigue.
  • Update Your Lists Regularly.  Make sure any data you are using for third-party lists is updated regularly and is relevant, clean data.  This helps promote a primed and relevant audience to market to.
  • Segment your audience.  Send the right messages to the right people.  Filtering your lists and data helps you send to the right audience.  Data today, can do that for you!
  • Know when to disengage.  Be willing to admit when a certain audience or digital channel is not working, and instead focus your efforts on the audiences that DO want to hear your message.
  • Be relevant!  Building a strategic plan to provide value to your audience on whatever digital channels you are on can help you be relevant and valuable to them.  They will not be tired from hearing about you, but rather excited to hear from you!   We like to call this “value trade.” Simply ask yourself if you would respond to this offer. In most cases not. We see our value far greater then our audience will. We tend to ask for way too much too early in most cases. We want to live for another day and keep our conversation going forward where most transactions take place.

Your best relationships didn’t happen overnight they were built on value and trust.