Spring Cleaning for Marketers: Zombies, Unloved Leads, Email Upkeep and More

Spring is teasing the East Coast with sporadic warm weather these days, while it’s being downright mean to Chicagoland. Nevertheless, the reality is that we’re already a month into spring. For marketers, warm weather or not, it’s high time for some spring cleaning. This means taking stock of current processes and habits, seeing how far they’ve strayed from best practices, and reining them back in.

Zombies and the unloved
There are two types of leads that should be separated from the rest and treated with special care, according to Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and marketing officer for Corporate Visions: “zombies” and “the unloved.”

Zombies are leads that haven’t clicked, opened, watched or browsed anything you’ve sent them in the last two years. “If you’ve been hitting your database frequently enough, take these off your blast list — they’re only dragging down your click-through rates and mucking up your database,” Riesterer says. “If you’ve got a talented business development team, try a different tactic: Hand this group over to those callers to attack with provocative phone calls and attention-grabbing email messages instead.”

The unloved, on the other hand, comprises leads that have been handed off to sales but never converted into the pipeline. “You know you’ve got an issue with your sales conversations when a good chunk of the leads that came to you to solve their business needs end up deciding — after talking to your salespeople — that they’re OK after all. These are leads you have to re-engage with a compelling, visual message that unhinges their status quo and sparks a dialogue that drives them toward a decision,” according to Riesterer.

Leave the checking up to them
Those who pre-check boxes or use defaulted positive opt-in mechanisms are showing poor form. “This is simply a bad practice, and avoiding publishers and intermediaries that engage in this practice will save marketers from future problems a pre-check can cause,” says Elie Ashery, a principal of RegReady.

He adds that marketers only want prospects that have explicitly granted permission for contact, and while avoiding these tactics will yield smaller numbers, the leads that do come through will be higher quality and more likely to make a purchase.

Quick, steady and relevant follow-up
The benefits of fast follow-up with leads are well known by now, but what marketers might overlook is the importance of steadfastness.

Remind leads why they’re hearing from you, Ashery says. “Know which digital properties your co-registration leads are coming from so that you can reference them in your introductory email. Have a plan for future communications, as well. You’ve got to maintain momentum.”

Marketers must also ensure that their follow-up messages to the initial co-registration ad are accurate and relevant. “Develop a quality auto-responder campaign and follow through on what they were expecting to receive,” Ashery says. “The auto-responder should be CAN-SPAM compliant and offer subscribers an easy way to remove themselves.”

Ads that draw the right leads
“Make sure your copy and graphics are contextually relevant or have demographic appeal to the digital property your ads are syndicated to,” Ashery says. He adds that marketers should remember that low-value incentives and sweepstakes attract low-value leads.

Data validation
Bad data and email addresses suck unnecessary time and resources, so data validation at the source is worth the investment, according to Ashery. “If cleansing and validation is not an option at the opt-in source, do it as quickly as possible before the data enters your CRM or ESP system.”

Email maintenance
Email performance metrics tell interesting stories, but they merely spotlight the strengths and weaknesses of processes that happen before emails are sent. Sal Tripi, assistant vice president of digital operations and compliance at Publishers Clearing House, points to a number of back-end tasks that need to happen before the “Send” button is pressed:

• Create the proper infrastructure: Marketers need to make sure that their system receives and categorizes bounces properly so they know that bounces are being appropriately captured and acted on. “Unknown Users,” “Mailbox Full,” “Policy Block” and “Network Congestion” are some of the main types of bounces, each requiring a different action.
• Understand your sender reputation: “In the past, content was the driving force behind delivery,” Tripi says. “Now with improvements in technology, delivery filters focus more on sender reputation than content.” The most important factor is the percentage of complaints to sent volume, though ISPs also look at the total email volume sent, unknown user rate and reject rate, among other things. Tripi mentions Sender Score as a helpful way to see your reputation at the IP level.
• Know what your sender reputation is for links in emails: Since the reputation of advertisers whose links are included in emails affects a sender’s reputation, marketers should beware advertisers with a poor reputation. They can negatively the delivery of a campaign as well as an IP’s reputation, Tripi warns. “More importantly, be wary of subjecting your list to advertisers with negative reputations, as they likely obtained that reputation by aggressive marketing campaigns that their users did not find welcome.”
• Know and understand your deliverability rate: This requires knowing the standard delivery rates from your ESP and the breakdown of inbox-to-junk information. “The use of production seeds is a good mechanism to accomplish this,” Tripi says. “It is important to not only monitor overall delivery but also delivery to individual ISPs.”
• Keep your lists clean: Maintaining clean email lists is a preemptive way to avoid having emails reported as spam. Marketers need to have a plan to remove dormant email addresses from their lists. “Mailers with a high frequency may want to consider a more aggressive removal process than mailers with a more conservative mailing frequency,” Tripi says.
• Remember the consumer: This is the most important step to ensure good email deliverability, according to Tripi. Emails need to be in line with recipients’ expectations, which is why transparency at the time of opting in and in the early stages of a program are essential. “Remember, unlike other channels, the consumer is in control,” Tripi says, noting that consumers who were once willing recipients can report emails they receive as spam and damage a company’s reputation.

What other things should marketers be doing as part of their spring cleaning routine?

By Jason Hahn