Brutal! Ghosted by an Email Subscriber in 8 Moves

Ghosted. It’s worse than being text-dumped. Not responding to emails means marketers may never understand why consumers broke their hearts.

To rescue lovelorn marketers, John Thies — CEO and co-Founder of Email on Acid — told Target Marketing about eight reasons why consumers may stop engaging with marketers and what marketers can do to win them back. Or better yet, never force consumers to ghost marketers in the first place.

John Thies

Thies lays out the eight reasons why consumers are ghosting marketers:

1. You Sent Unsolicited Content

Free is good, right? Not always — especially in emails about products or services that people aren’t interested in. Try growing your subscriber list organically with single or double opt-in forms.

Though the instant gratification of purchasing a list of emails may be tempting, you risk emailing unfit leads or jeopardizing yourself by emailing counterfeit email addresses.

Between single and double opt-in methods, stick to the double opt-in method. Marketers like feeling validated, knowing our subscribers love us as much as we love them. Plus, GetResponse performed a study of which method performed better and found double opt-ins bettered their email marketing statistics.

2. Forget to Tag-Team

When it comes to ensuring email marketing success, an ESP is necessary. They can improve your efforts in a number of ways, including personalized emails for large groups, comprehensive reporting, pre-designed templates and creative materials, and augmented delivery.

You can’t be expected to know all the CAN-SPAM laws back and front, but an ESP can! Doing so will help in the upkeep of your sender reputation and inbox placement, and will help your overall bottom line.

3. Have Poor Presentation

It’s the equivalent of showing up to the date smelly and unkempt. When it comes to email marketing, presentation plays a huge role. And, no matter if your unappealing or dysfunctional email is headed to a new lead or a long-time client, your ROI could really take a hit.

Not all HTML is created equal, thus a quick test to a mobile device or stationary computer won’t give you an accurate scope of your email display across devices. Your email can look perfect in one email client and like a disaster in others.

Test your email across all devices.

4. Go for the Hard-Sell

The last thing you want to do the first time you contact someone is aggressively sell yourself. Chill. Remember, you need to build rapport with someone before you ask them to buy your product.

To do this effectively, you can employ a drip campaign — automated emails triggered by a certain action like browsing a certain part of the site or downloading a whitepaper. These emails move the subscriber through the sales cycle and can receive a 119 percent higher click rate than broadcast emails.

5. Be Clingy

There’s nothing attractive about completely infiltrating a subscriber’s inbox. Give the subscriber time to miss you by properly timing your messages.

A UK DMA report (opens as a PDF) found that, within the last three years, companies have contacted subscribers less frequently. DMA’s research concluded that about one-fifth of companies send contacts four to five emails per month. You can use this as a starting point for your sending frequency.