Behavioral personalization is at the core of reaching out to customers. It has given email marketers an unprecedented level of control over who they target. They have particularly been able to leverage it in the four key areas of customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and monetization. It is now common to see genuine case studies of transformative results such as 100% increase in click through and a threefold increase in sales.
However, with a poor email marketing campaign, it can be quite expensive. By not being able to target the right people, it can burden the company with huge costs from nonsubscribers. At the same time, if you have a large list size, but only half of your subscribers are real or actually responding, this is simply leading to lower open rates and higher list hosting costs.
The good news is that there are many ways to avoid wasted subscribers and dollars when it comes to your mailing list and paid advertising. Here is a breakdown of the real cost of nonsubscribers, and what you can do to clean up your list, lower costs and increase ROI in the process.
The Cost
How much can single ill-times email really cost? After all, most of us have been sending bad emails for years, and we have learned to accept the result of these poor actions over time. The thinking is that sending a marketing email may cost just a few pennies. On the other hand, implementing a carefully planned email marketing campaign could cost a lot.
That thinking is flawed. Sending a bad email is not just about a single missed opportunity that only costs a few pennies. In essence, a missed subscription opportunity could have a ricochet effect that costs you a lot. Firstly, there is the effect on customer relations. Secondly, it will have an effect on your bottom line. Companies need to start seeing the negative effect of this instead of simply seeing it as a neutral.
1. Brand Power
When a recipient of an email subscribes to your marketing email, it presents an opportunity for you to sell your brand. From that moment on, you will have exclusive access to them in their email, and you can send branding material to them at will. This will help strengthen your brand over time.
The result is that your brand will grow and make it into a recognizable brand. One of the end goals of any marketing campaign is to grow a brand. When customers can see your brand and recognize it without any research, that is a plus for you. You may not even have to spend as much money on future campaigns to promote products. As long as they have the company’s branding, it will be easy to sell them.
A lost subscription opportunity means you will have to incur great costs to sell your products. Your brand is simply not recognizable enough, no matter how great your product may be.
2. Expensive PR Campaigns
A bad public image is something that no company wants. However, at one time or the other, your image will be dented. It will require that you engage in a PR campaign to reassure your customers. However, that can be quite expensive if you do not have a way to reach out to them.
That means you will have to spend money online and hope that you reach some of them. With a huge subscription list, this can be quite cheap. You will only need to create content, and you will not spend much on ads. The money you saved with a poor email marketing campaign will now have to be spent trying to repair your image.
3. Policy Change costs
When you are marketing on platforms such as Google or social media, all your marketing efforts could go to waste overnight. A policy shift could cause you to start afresh and try to find those to whom you had been marketing.
When this happens, it could cost the same amount as you had already spent or you would need to spend even more. Sometimes, these platforms could hike the price, which places them out of your budget.
However, you do not need to spend money on an email list. You already own the list whether these platforms change their policies or not. You will still be able to send your marketing material. Although it may be costly to target subscribers to start with, not having them can prove quite expensive.
4. Limited Analytical Power
With subscribers, you can tell how many have been active and for how long. That is not so with other marketing campaigns. You have no way of telling whether the people you target are still active or not.
You may end up spending a lot of money on people who are no longer active on the platform. While it may not seem like much to lose a few in the short term, those costs will build up over the years. With email subscribers, you can do an intensive analysis to see who to send email to and whom you do not need. You can thus save a few pennies, which build up into huge savings over time.
5. It Eliminates Guesswork
When people subscribe to your email list, you know they have an interest in your products. It thus becomes much easier for you to create content for them with that in mind. You do not have to struggle so much trying to figure out what they want.
With nonsubscribers, you are always guessing. You have to do a lot of A/B testing, which uses up a lot of your resources and time. That is amongst the main reasons why you should always aim to have a subscription list.
6. Lowered Expectations
Once you send the wrong email and someone does not subscribe, it lowers expectation. The next time they receive an email from you, their expectations will be even lower. With time, it reduces your chances of ever getting them to click on your emails, even when you have a valuable new product you want to share.
The result will be that you will miss opportunities to sell products. With time, these mistakes will have a major impact no your bottom line. It will also mean that you have to spend money to try to reach out to potential customers through other mediums.
7. Negative Brand Image
No subscription usually happens when you send low-quality emails or irrelevant emails to the wrong audience. When that happens, viewers of your emails could develop a negative perception of your brand — thus ultimately leading to more unsubscribes and complaints than anything else.
Such emails may often be viewed as spammy, which they will associate with your brand. As a result, products with your brand on them could also be viewed in the same light. At the end of it, the lost selling opportunities could snowball to destroy your company. You may find it hard to sell anything if these people start talking about your Spammy emails on social media. In essence, they will have influenced others negatively on your brand.
8. Failed Communication
One of the goals of email subscription is customer acquisition. If you fail to get subscribers, it will only drive your customer acquisition costs much higher. Even customers that you have already sold to will need to be marketed to again. The seemingly small costs you incur with a poor email marketing campaign will end up costing you a lot.
9. Spending Money no Traffic
One of the metrics that search engines rank a page in the search results is by checking how much traffic it gets. With a subscription list, you are able to get a lot of traffic to your site without spending money on your ads.
This has a positive effect on search engine raking. The result is that you will not need to spend so much for people to view your site on the first page of results. Without a subscription list, you will have to work hard to get even a single person to your site. This will mean you have low traffic, which will cause search engines to rank your page lower or even on the second page of search results.
Grow Your Mailing List and See Immediate Results
At the end of the day, your email list building and marketing efforts are only as good as the ad copy of value you provide to your audience. Once you’ve mastered this process and have an effective lead acquisition to customer funnel or strategy in place, it’s then time to start growing your list size through paid marketing methods.
If you would like to grow your subscriptions and avoid the costs of nonsubscribers, you should get in touch with us. Sign up to our email list building service to turn your email marketing fortunes around for the better.