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The Importance of Cleaning and Refining Your Email Audience List

Last updated: July 17, 2023

Earlier this month we looked into what lies behind the success of email campaigns. One commonality that was found throughout the emails sent was that the audience list matters. For email deployments and reoccurring email series like newsletters and marketing promotions, it is important to make sure you’re targeting your audience. Things like the content you’re providing and the cadence of your email deployments are matters to take into account. More than that, ensuring your audience is engaged can be extremely beneficial for email campaigns. Knowing your audience in order to reach them appropriately is pertinent for better email campaigns for a variety of reasons.

Ensuring that Your Audience List Is Up-To-Date Will Help to Accurately Reach Your Audience

Customer data is a group of material that can become extremely cluttered, inaccurate, and overwhelming if not reviewed and refined on a regular basis. Information can easily become out-of-date and accurately engaging with your audience can become a difficult task. Setting up a cadence to review and update customer information will ensure that your audience lists include correct information. Once this is done, the confidence in the data will be stronger and will make targeting and segmenting groups of customers much easier. Having multiple points of information to focus on or segment with will assist in better suited content for the email recipients. Like we found in our initial epromo review, accurate content that your audience is interested in performs better for email campaigns.

Providing Relevant Information Will Build Brand Rapport with Customers

Knowing your audience and reaching them in a way that is of interest to them is extremely important for engagement and open rates on a specific email, but also assists in the overall sentiment that customers have for your brand. The more content that you can provide them that is helpful, the better positioned your brand will be in the eyes of the customers. If you are able to build up a pattern of consistently providing useful and timely information to your customers, then this will build trust and habitual engagement in your audience. Long term, email promotions will become much easier with a more dedicated and loyal recipient base.

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You’ll Have Better Engagement Numbers with a Cleansed, Interested Audience

A basic callout is that open rates will increase. Great – that is a positive, but also quite intuitive. When the unengaged audience members are removed, then that will decrease the denominator, leading to a higher open percentage. Yes, this is true, but there is more that is going on behind the scenes that isn’t quite as straightforward.

Within email algorithms, customer engagement plays a large part in determining inbox deliverability. The engagement evaluation includes the sum of all user’s actions with the email. Actions by the receiver are tracked: whether the user opens the email, moves the email from the spam folder to the inbox, replies to the email, unsubscribes from the email, marks the email as spam, moves it to the junk folder, ignores the email altogether, etc. The dormant customers that aren’t engaging in the email promotions may be hurting your deliverability more than you thought. For example, in a recent cleanse that we did for our enewsletter recipients, we refined our audience and eliminated approximately 1,100 dormant recipients. These users were not engaging with our emails so we removed them from the list. On the next deployment that was sent, the number of opens increased by 30 users. Despite cutting the number of recipients by over one-thousand people, our total number of opens increased. The cleansing of our data allowed our emails to reach the inbox of more customers who were actually interested in reading the email.

Knowing the benefits of a refined audience list will spark action in enhancing your epromo strategy. Look out for our next step of tackling email engagement with an overview of HOW to best cleanse and refine your email lists. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, reach out to emailsuccess@omeda.com.

Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash

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