When was the last time your marketing team reviewed your marketing strategy? If it's been awhile, you may be undermining your own success.
For some companies and organizations, re-evaluating their overall marketing strategy is a constant process of assessment and adjustment.
For others… not so much.
If your team hasn't reviewed its email campaign strategy recently and updated those strategies to reflect the new realities of email marketing, those old policies could be actively undermining your marketing success.
Are you still emailing unengaged contacts?
An excellent example of these outdated SOPs is emailing unengaged contacts. At some point, you'll need to admit that some of your prospects just aren't that into you. So it's time to cut ties, and for good reasons.
For instance: Email service providers take note if you're continually sending emails that aren't being opened or engaged with in any way. Continually sending emails to unengaged contacts will result in a lower sender score, or email sender reputation.
Your sender score is just what it sounds like: it's a score from 1-100 assigned by Return Path and is based on metrics like spam complaints, bouncebacks, or rejections due to the email service providers' policy.
A low sender score will likely result in your marketing messages being diverted to the Spam folder, even for the engaged customers.
Read that again: Your engaged contacts may not receive your messages if your Email Sender Reputation sinks too low.
As bad as that is, it can get even worse. Depending on the location of your customers, repeatedly sending unsolicited emails can be a violation of privacy laws, like CAN-SPAM (United States), CCPA/CPRA (California-specific privacy law), and GDPR (for European countries).
These kinds of violations can result in significant fines. Imagine explaining to the C-suite that ROI took a hit because the marketing department had to pay fines. Sounds unpleasant.
Speaking of wasting money, if your CRM charges based on the number of contacts in your database, holding onto unengaged contacts may result in higher CRM costs for contacts that will (likely) never recoup.
And suppose these unengaged contacts aren't being segmented and are part of a larger, generally-engaged audience. Those metrics will skew lower, resulting in an inaccurate portrait of your overall marketing success.
In short, there is no real upside to keeping unengaged contacts in your contact database, and there are some severe downsides to emailing them.
Wondering about your data quality?
We can help. Our Dark Pool data cleanup tool will show you exactly how polluted your contact database is in raw numbers and overall percentages. And just about every company's database has some level of data pollution.
We'll show you which contacts are lost causes (or were never real to begin with, like bots), which may be reachable through other channels, which are engaged, and more.
We'll also show you what your REAL engagement metrics would be without these unengaged contacts dragging them down. Our Time Machine is like a before-and-after snapshot for your campaigns. You'll see the recorded numbers and the metrics without the garbage.
By incorporating active data hygiene methods and updated campaign strategy protocols, you'll reduce your marketing costs and improve your metrics, sender score, email deliverability, and ROI. Plus, you'll have more accurate data on which to base your future marketing decisions.
Sign up today for a free Dark Pool data health assessment. We only need three months of bounceback data and about 45 minutes to review it with your team. There is no cost or obligation. Your company's bottom line will thank you.
Want to see how Motiva can help you succeed? Schedule a demo today!