It was three months ago when a D2C skincare brand got in touch with me as their revenue from email was plummeting by almost 40% in the last quarter. Everything seemed to be status quo for them as far as their setup was concerned, i.e., same ESP, same email templates, same frequency of emails. But their open rates had quietly slipped away in the last ten weeks.
What I found was rather obvious once the data was pulled: 22% of their list hadn’t opened an email in over 400 days, with some of these email addresses having not been touched in over two years (i.e. since a Black Friday promotion a couple of years prior).
So, for all of you out there chasing the big list and treating it like it is an asset to your company, you can stop. It is not. A big list of emails becomes a liability for your company the moment it stops engaging with your emails. And, the minute it stops engaging, Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook will all figure that out way before you do.
What's actually happening behind the scenes
Mailbox providers don’t actually read your emails to decide whether or not to send them to the inbox or spam folder. They rely on behavior to determine whether or not an email should be classified as spam. So, even if a chunk of your list never opens your emails, never clicks on any links, and never even scrolls to read the body copy, that behavior is logged against your sending domain and your IP address. It doesn’t matter if the other people on your list love you and open your emails every time. The behavior of the unengaged people on your list can have a negative impact on your domain’s reputation.
These 20% of silent subscribers actually matter for your sender reputation. They don’t matter for your personal, egotistical desire to get emails out to everyone. What matters for your deliverability is that 80% of subscribers who love you to get email from you. In aggregate, their engagement (or lack thereof) is what actually gets measured and decides the deliverability of your emails.
This problem is afflicting a wide variety of companies: software as a service, online retailers, local real estate agents. The commonality is that every single one of them is treating their entire list the same way. They’re sending to everyone on their list, the unengaged portion of the list isn’t opening emails, and Gmail’s Postmaster Tools are quietly eroding their domain reputation score over time. Then, the engaged portion of the list gets sent to Promotions or even to Spam.
For example, when I worked with a D2C skincare brand their email open rates had dropped almost 40% in a single quarter. Everything looked right, they were using the same ESP, sending at the same frequency, with similar subject lines and content. However, three months of audit and cleanup later their open rates had shot up to 34% on the exact same content, sender and subject line style. The main change was the removal of silent subscribers who had been getting emails for years but never opened, engaged or unsubscribed.
Why “just email more” makes it worse, not better.
Most marketers will send more emails in an attempt to try and get better open rates. But almost always this will have the complete opposite effect.
The negative signal from each of the emails that are being sent to unengaged users will only serve to continue to indicate to Gmail, Yahoo and the others that this sender’s content is not wanted. It’s similar to someone knocking on a door where there is no answer. The louder that the person knocking continues to knock on the door, the more clear it will become to any others who might be passing by that no one is home at that address and therefore there must be no interest in any content that might be coming from that address.
We also worked with a B2B SaaS company. The initial content in the onboarding sequence of emails wasn’t generating the desired conversions. So instead of tweaking the copy, the decision was made to add three more emails to the sequence. However, engagement continued to drop off. It wasn’t until we cut the sequence back down to two emails and then added a re-engagement filter, before the recipient was added to the sequence in the first place, that conversion rates shot up by 18%.
The part that actually matters for deliverability, not just vanity metrics
Why Sender Reputation Is Relevant To Deliverability & To SEO / How Search & Email Correlate Each Other, Especially For New Brands
For any marketer that is utilizing outbound cold email as part of a broader growth strategy for their company, the implications for their overall sender reputation of having a poor email deliverability reputation for their cold email campaigns (which typically are running off of a subdomain for said campaign) could have unintended consequences and impact their company's overall domain reputation. In other words, having a poor sender reputation for your cold email campaigns could impact the deliverability of your regular email campaigns that are coming from the same root domain.
How to actually find your silent 20%
First, most ESPs (email service providers) make it very hard to see who your silent 20% are. Here’s what I actually check for when I audit a list for a client.
First, instead of last-send date I look at last-open date. There’s a huge difference between sending 40 emails to someone and them having read 40 emails. The latter is much more desirable than the former. So I segment my list by last-open date.
As I said above, engagement in almost every audit that I conduct is lowest in list segments acquired through paid lead magnets or contest giveaways (such as “win a $500 gift card” to a furniture online store). The following chart from an audit of the email list of a furniture online store shows that the open rate of 18 month old emails sent to subscribers acquired through paid lead magnets is a mere 3% while the open rate of emails sent to subscribers who acquired their subscription through the purchase of a competing product is 41%.
Third, the free email providers (Yahoo, AOL, etc.) usually have a much higher number of dormant/abandoned email addresses than Gmail users or business email addresses. People tend to go through a lot of free email addresses as they lose or throw them away.
What to actually do once you've found them
Note that don't delete the people who haven't opened in 6 months. You throw away a bunch of potential subscribers who are in a slow engagement cycle (e.g. B2B buyers with long purchase cycles, or a seasonal business).
Instead of deleting people who haven’t opened in 6 months, I run every client through a two-step process for dealing with silent subscribers. Step one is to send a re-engagement email (i.e. not another generic “we miss you” type email) that actually gives the subscriber a reason to come back and engage with your content again. For example, with the skincare brand I mentioned earlier, we created a re-engagement email that was very short and very honest, and essentially asked the subscriber if they wanted us to stop emailing them. This email got a 9% click rate from the silent subscribers (i.e. people who had been silent for over a year), which proves to me that people actually do notice when you haven’t emailed them in a while, and that all it takes is a tiny bit of effort to get them to engage with your content again.
Step 2 – Suppress quiet subscribers. Suppressing senders is a feature offered by email service providers. This feature will mark senders that do not receive engagement from their list to not send emails to that list anymore. This list will not get deleted from your account though, so in case that quiet subscriber comes back through a purchase or other channel to your site, all of a sudden your emails will start getting delivered again because the negative reputation that was building up on that quiet subscriber’s account will stop.
This particular client had a rather tumultuous situation with his email marketing previously. But after having us audit his list and having us create the proper re-engagement campaigns for silent subscribers, the sender’s reputation had bounced back to “High” according to Google’s Postmaster Tools within 5 weeks. And as an added bonus, his revenues had started to climb back up to previous levels even before his list had a chance to grow back to previous sizes.
A smaller list that lands in the inbox will always outperform a bigger list that lands in spam. This is because deliverability is determined by behavior on the part of the recipient (opening, reading, clicking), not by the size of the list. As such, a 40,000 person list with 70% engagement will always outperform a 200,000 person list
This is one of the hardest points of view for founders and for marketing teams in general to adopt, as list size is a very, very strong vanity metric. But deliverability, as with search engines, doesn’t care about your list size. It cares about your behavior. In other words, 40,000 people that engage in high volumes (70%+ open rates) will outperform a 200,000 person list that only engages in low volumes (15%+ open rates) in terms of revenue, but also in terms of how your mailbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) will treat your domain.
If you manage cold outreach, transactional email, or high-volume campaigns and you’re seeing unexplained drops in open rates or deliverability, then the first place you need to look is at your list, and specifically at the quiet 20% of subscribers who are doing nothing and slowly but surely getting Gmail to recognize that nobody wants to hear from you.
At Pingovo, we like to run a check of where the silent subscribers are hiding, and the impact on your deliverability. This is often something that gets misdiagnosed, and so too much time is wasted on improving the content, before addressing the underlying list health issues. Just like repainting a house with a leaking roof, the paint job won’t make a difference until you’ve sorted out the foundation! Want a quick no-fluff audit on where your silent subscribers are hiding in your list and how they are impacting your deliverability? We can provide that for you in a diagnostic audit on www.pingovo.com.
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