As the preferred method of communication across B2B companies, email continues to be a favorite tool for marketers and business owners. However, it's important to remember that the success of your email campaign is only as strong as your subscriber list. Maintaining a healthy list could be the make or break of a campaign’s success.
Why It Matters
One of the biggest factors creating inactive subscribers is job changes. Mass layoffs across multiple industries in 2023, along with millions of people quitting their jobs in 2022, means that a lot of your existing contact information may lead to deactivated accounts. To prevent this from hurting your business, it's crucial to stay on top of email list management.
The average ROI for email marketing is $40 for every $1 spent, so it's worth investing time and money in email list management. With billions of email users worldwide, email marketing is a great way to spread the word about your business and its products or services to the masses. The trick is not ending up in spam or an inactive user’s inbox.
According to the ZeroBounce Email List Decay Report, 22.71% of a subscriber list can decay in just one year, and 20.19% of those lost contacts are due to invalid or deactivated emails. This is a result of people switching email addresses or jobs — or providing invalid information at sign-up. Email list decay can also occur due to recipients unsubscribing — a typical part of email marketing. That said, marketers and business leaders should inspect email delivery reports regularly to track and investigate email delivery failures.
Tips For Maintaining Your Subscriber List
Email list management involves regularly checking for and removing invalid addresses, as well as following up with those whose contact information has changed. Thankfully, there are proactive steps you can take to avoid losing valuable business connections.
- Include a link in your emails that invites subscribers to change their information so you don't lose contact should they leave their position.
- Include a survey on your unsubscribe page to find out why readers no longer wish to receive your emails. This allows former subscribers to let you know if you're emailing too often, not sharing valuable information, or sending them newsletters after they've left their company or industry.
- Ask partnering companies to send updated lists of their staff so that new hires and former employees are updated.
- Make sure your brand’s subscribe link is visible on your website and posted on social media channels where clients are active.
- When collecting information during an online transaction, include an invitation to subscribe to email updates so you can continue business communications with the customer.
If a contact has quit or been laid off in recent months, it’s worth reaching out to the company to see if a new person has taken over their position. Their replacement may be able to receive your emails. It also allows you to re-introduce your company to a fresh set of eyes. Your former contact's replacement may be willing to continue or even expand their business relationship with you.
Don't Get Dumped
It’s important to note that email subscriber lists aren't solely responsible for the success of your email marketing campaigns. The content you share with your subscribers, including subject lines, email designs, and written email content, is the most important part of your email campaigns. If you want to keep email list management easy and avoid unsubscribes, regularly audit your content to ensure it's not flagged as junk or ignored by subscribers. If your messages aren't getting through, it may be time to diagnose subject line issues or refine your content.
Conclusion
With so many email users in the B2B space, subscriber management is a crucial step in the email marketing process. It may seem tedious, but screening your subscriber lists regularly helps ensure that you’re marketing to the correct audience and that your team’s efforts are not in vain. And the more you stay on top of it, the less of a burden it becomes.
