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Making Bacon not Spam

Posted in Digital, Latest reporters' blogs February 13th, 2008 by Dela

Email open rates are the focus of much attention, but however high your open rates are there is a very good chance that almost half the subscribers on your list are inactive and didn’t open a single message you sent to them last year!

If this is your experience, you’re not alone. On average we’ve found that 40% of the subscribers on a wide variety of lists do not open a single message sent to them for well over six months. Some commentators have said that this length of time passing means they have ‘emotionally unsubscribed’ but simply haven’t got round to hitting the unsubscribe button yet.

So should you stop mailing them?

Well I was talking to a publisher recently who sends out 60,000 emails a month just to let customers know the latest magazine is in the shops . A very low percentage of these emails are ever actually opened, but here’s the kicker - sales go up every time he sends it.

So even if subscribers are not engaging with offers and letters you send them, this doesn’t mean they don’t want to receive them. They may still want to receive messages from you but are not in a position to take up the offer today.

At Podcast Pittsburgh 2 this August, a group of delegates coined a phrase for this type of email. They call it Bacn – defined as ‘Email you want – but not right now’. These guys were trying to put a handle on the ’twitter’ (another US originating word) of emails you get from news alerts, friends and social networking sites and it appears to have stuck.

I don’t believe there are many people out there who stay subscribed to your messages just because they can’t be bothered to unsubscribe. A better description would be that they are ‘unemotionally subscribed’ – until that is they are ready to buy. Put another way, the 40% not responding are not necessarily ‘emotionally unsubscribed’ individuals, they may just want to monitor the Bacn coming their way.

They may not respond for months, but when they do, it will be when they’re at the point in their buying cycle where they’re likely to make a purchase. For a supermarket this could be a couple of times a month, for a book shop two or three times a year, for insurance, once a year.

The important thing is to stay in touch – it will eventually bring in the bacon (sorry).

Dela Quist CEO of email marketing agency Alchemy Worx Ltd