Send a bunch of emails, the more you send the more likely you will get a response right? It is just a numbers game right? Not always…
First things first, in case you are not familiar with Email autoresponders let me brief you here. Email auto responders are a software as a service method of sending, segmenting, adding people to lists, list farming and managing your customers, leads or prospects emails. There are many of such services from Mail Chimp and constant contact to integrated with CRMs like Infusionsoft and Salesforce.
The purpose of most email auto responders is to be able to manage and send emails to different groups of people but this is what this article is all about. Treating everyone the same is a mistake not everyone in your list is the same, even if sending 1000 emails costs you the same as sending 10. Let me explain.
Lets say you have a list of 1000 people and you want to send perhaps a newsletter or offers, announcements, reminders, more offers, more announcements etc… May be you see where I am going with this, but the truth is not everyone wants to hear from you all the time. Chances are the bottom 20% of people want to hear from you may be once a quarter or less! While the top 20% might want to hear every week, the top 4% every day and the top .9% might even like to hear from you several times a day!
“So what?” you say? ah, here is the trick. By sending everything to your ENTIRE list you may get a few sales or desired actions which may cost the same as sending it to 10 but you must also factor the “annoyance” cost. Sure they might unsubscribe or even put in a complaint, but worse than that they might “mentally check out, mentally unsubscribe” and mentally put you and your company in the “ignore” inbox. You have actually trained them to ignore your email.
This is no small thing. Is like Branding in reverse. Lets talk about Branding… Guess who won the Nobel Prize for discovering branding? A guy called Ivan Pavlov… I think you have heard that name before yea? Pavlov Dogs? classical conditioning? exactly.. Pavlov was able to create a permanent unconscious associative memory of the ringing bell with the taste of meat! Branding!
Don’t “condition” your prospects or a big chunk of your list to ignore you. Rather, condition them to read your email by providing relevant value for them. How do you do this? through segmentation.
We are going to segment your list from most responsive to least responsive, now there are a number of solutions that can do this depending on what autoresponder or CRM you use but the principle is this. The more actions they make, blogs they read or videos they watch, it might be an indication of their responsiveness. Treat them accordingly.
There is a saying: “treating everyone equally is the greatest form of unfairness” Political commentary or viewpoint aside, I think we all understand that not everyone deserves or even wants the same time, money or effort spent on them. Nothing is ever “free” and emails are not the exception.
This is really interesting. I’d like to know more about how to do this with my LinkedIn connections.
sure thing Andy, lets schedule a time and we can go over your specific situation and how we can structure the technology to make it work.