Deliverability is to email as algorithms are to Facebook and Google!

We all know about the ever changing algorithms that govern whether our content gets seen over on Facebook and in search results, but have you ever given thought to the determinants of your emails being seen?

Deliverability is the buzzword in email circles. Given that email is a great conversion tool for your social leads, it’s important to understand it if you’re going to drive the great results you want from social media.

Reasons why you should do list cleaning at least once every couple of years

• It enhances deliverability if you’re working off a clean responsive list. Email clients take signals from the level of engagement with your emails. If you have a large group of non responders, this will make it more likely that your emails will go into the promotions tab, or worse, spam.
• Reducing your list to engage only with those who engage with you saves money. Most email messaging software pricing is based on list size. Why pay to message people who don’t get what you’re saying because the mails are simply not being seen? That’s literally throwing money away!
• Your metrics will shine after a list cleaning exercise. Obviously open and click rates will go through the roof if you’re omitting all the dead wood.

So are you convinced yet? Let me show you how we did recently over on the Brightspark master list.

What We Did

With Valentine’s Day approaching, we devised a series of emails that were written about love and breakups, and had a humourous tone to them, but they were deadly serious in intention:

• All communicated that if we didn’t hear from the person by 14 February we would remove them from our list, forever!
• They also had a hook and a clear call to action – just hit reply before 14 February and you can win a subscription to the Brightspark Learn Social Media Like A Pro online course, valued at €799.

Or this one… talk about holiday romance on Courtown beach!

Results

As we have seen before, when we’ve run this exercise for clients, there tends to be a bit of action at the start, then response rates go down. And the weekend also brings a little lift because you might get some people reading on a Saturday who might not get to you mid-week.

It’s important that you try to send your emails out over several days, aim to get one per day of the week if you can.

Feedback

The good thing to know is that not only did people hit respond, but several commented on the quality of the execution.

“I’m sorry for neglecting you. I’ll open up in future :)” – Dave

And this:

“This is so funny! Well done on grabbing my attention 🙂 Wishing you a lovely valentines day.” – Carol

Cost Savings

We were successful in converting 12.4% of our non responder list to responders.

The corollary of this is that we were left with 795 non-responders out of the initial 908 list.  Earlier this week, I had to take a big deep breath, and remove those people from my master list.  Gone!  No more will those 795 deliverability killers hear from me.

The cost saving isn’t that much as I’m on a great plan. It’s only about €13, but that’s €156 per year on a monthly send, which is money that can be spent on something else.

The main point is that I am now confident that the entire Master List of Brightspark is clean, our emails are well received, and our deliverability will remain high.

What about your email list?

When’s the last time you did a bit of list cleaning?