Maryrose Lyons blogging since 2003...

Email Non-Responders

September 30, 2008 at 10:43 am

The autumn edition of Walking the Talk went out last week and response rates amongst those who opened it were very good. However, we do have a number of non-responders which I always keep an eye on.

Non-responders are people on your list who do not open the email or click any links. It used to only raise an issue about deliverability - ie. are the emails getting through spam filters to reach them in the first place?

But now it also begs the question of how many subscribers are using mobile devices. Given that my list is mostly business users, and not so much to my iphone adoring peers, it’s likely that this is not such a big issue at present, but definitely one that needs to be addressed for the future. So the next edition of Walking the Talk is going to have a separate mobile friendly version. A little extra work perhaps, but an evolving best practice for email marketing I think.

In the meantime, how to deal with non-responders?

What I do is compare lists of non-responders from the last edition and this edition. Any name that appears on both lists I will contact directly from my personal email address to inform them that Walking the Talk went out last week, and to ask them to add the email address to their trusted senders so that they might receive it in the future.

Tone of voice is very important. You don’t want to come across as too bossy. You also don’t want to seem too snoopy - ie. that their every move is being watched.

If this action is successful, it will mean that some of the non-responders will take action and hopefully receive the next edition of Walking the Talk into their inbox.  There will always be some who do not do anything, but that’s OK because a) it’s their choice not to and b) I don’t want to be contacting people who do not wish to hear from me.

Posted in Email Marketing |