Building an engaged, cross-channel list is critical for the success of both your email and SMS programs. Place thoughtfully curated acquisition strategies throughout your customer journey and across different channels to encourage email and SMS opt-in as much as possible. But it’s just as important to consider overall list health and reduce potential churn as much as possible to drive repeat purchase activity, increase customer lifetime value, and grow your engaged cross-channel audiences.

Don’t Flood Inboxes

The primary way to prevent list churn is to establish a consistent email and SMS broadcast frequency from the start and pause before hitting send to your entire list too many times. While peak shopping days, retail holidays, and the fourth quarter call for increased send frequency and more volume, you don’t want to burn out your contacts throughout the year.

Instead, focus on crafting a send calendar incorporating full-list broadcasts, triggered automation, and segmented campaigns that rely on engagement and purchase data. You should send the most email and text message volume to the most engaged contacts (frequently clicking and/or purchasing) and target your most compelling messaging for those who are least engaged – think announcements of new products and collections, your best deals, and high-value sales. You can create audiences based on a combination of Last Click Date, Last Purchase Date, and Last Open Date, among others, so you don’t have to build new segments each time you want to send.

Additionally, consider suppressing recent purchasers from the reminder messages you might send via email or text. If a contact just purchased, they likely don’t need to be reminded of the final hours remaining in your sale. Over-sending to your subscribers can encourage more unsubscribe activity and less engagement.

Get Personal with Relevant Messaging

In addition to your conscience, let your zero- and first-party data guide you! A powerful way to prevent list churn further is to make your messages as personal and relevant as possible. Think about it from your own POV: If you receive an email or SMS campaign recommending products you already purchased or include ones that are nothing like what you’re interested in, would you be inclined to open and click again?

Once you’ve established your regular broadcast frequency and how you define your engaged audiences, ensure your message creatives and copy are relevant to your contacts. This includes using as many dynamic Product Recommendations as possible via email, triggering 1:1 SMS campaigns and responding to inbound texts, and leveraging additional segmentation data to identify key groups for campaign strategies. Sending everything and anything to everyone and anyone will undoubtedly see your list growth trendline turn down. 

Consider List Cleansing

Opposite from proactively preventing list churn and extraneous unsubscribe activity, consider a regular list cleaning cadence for both your email and SMS programs. This goes with establishing your engagement-based audiences – Determine when you consider a contact completely lapsed and cut your losses. If they haven’t ever clicked, opened, or purchased, or haven’t done so after an extended period (think over a year), even after re-engagement and winback efforts, you can remove them from your database. This has additional deliverability and volume management benefits and protects your average engagement rate benchmarks. While any healthy cross-channel marketing program will always have contacts like this that don’t engage, you can prevent them from sitting on your list for too long.

Get Started Today

Continually acquiring new subscribers is vital for the ongoing success of your cross-channel digital marketing program. But just as important is keeping those lists healthy and reducing list churn as much as possible. Always be mindful of frequency, personalize your messages correctly, and keep a keen eye on your engagement metrics; you’ll see steady growth. For more information and to discuss your tactics specifically, contact your Account Manager. If you are not yet a Listrak client, get started here.