I’m a firm believer that anything good can always be made better. That’s why we’re talking about optimizing your marketing strategy in this post. You’ve executed the customer lifecycle marketing playbook and put in all the triggers, personalization, channels, and advertising necessary to grow your program. Now it’s time to tighten down all the bolts by asking questions like:

• Does my list health need a checkup?
• How can I benefit from unsubscribers?
• Where can I find ways to save money?

The Tune-up You Need

Nobody likes going to the doctor (except maybe hypochondriacs) but it’s always important to keep tabs on your health and make sure everything is humming along as it should be. Customer analytics can point out gaps in your strategy that are leaving money on the table. Things you should be looking for:

• Am I reaching out to disengaged contacts in other channels like social or mobile?
• Am I sending messages to contacts who (literally) never respond?
• Am I adding all my customers to my active list?

You should know which contacts are unsubscribed or have not opened an email in a few months. But do you know which of those are predicted to buy from you based on intent signals from other channels? Take advantage of purchase propensity models to reach out in other channels to drive conversions.

Just because a contact isn’t opening your emails doesn’t mean they never want to hear from you, but if they’re not engaging with your brand at all, you can likely save some money by removing the contacts least likely to buy and open emails from your daily broadcast campaigns.

Understandably, privacy concerns are top of mind for everyone these days. But one cohort of shoppers is often overlooked in my experience. How many of your customers have never subscribed to your marketing list? CAN-SPAM allows you to market to people you have a prior business relationship with, so add them to your email marketing list. At the very least, send them a triggered message after they buy asking them to confirm they would like to continue getting promotions from you via email.

Learning from Unsubscribes

You may think that once a contact unsubscribes from you, they’re lost. You’re mostly right, but you can really learn from contacts that are likely to unsubscribe before they do. Either periodically, or with a recurring message, send a message in plain text to those most likely to unsubscribe to find out what you can do better.

The campaign should feel like a personal message from perhaps your customer service manager. You can offer them a few clickable choices on how to improve their experience or direct them to a survey. What you learn from these underappreciated few may help improve your overall marketing strategy.

Optimizing to Save Money

Email has such a high ROI, rarely do we think about the money we might be wasting. With open rates hovering around 20% sometimes we forget that 80% of your list is not opening your emails. Lots of people use an active list filter to dump the disengaged, but predictive audiences can identify those who lose interest earlier. Drop the least likely to open/buy from all but one send per week. This way you can give them a chance to reactivate without wasting the other 4-6 sends.

Another great way to increase profits for your email program is to identify your full-price buyers and withhold coupons and promotions from them to keep them buying at full price. You can use predictive models that classify a customer’s affinity for items at full-price or to use a coupon.

Conclusion

These optimization tactics are just scratching the surface. Listrak’s solution is built on customer analytics that make it easy to find insights that move the needle. From acquisition to retention to optimization – we have the tools that help you level up your marketing campaigns… no data scientist required.