When managing your email marketing database, you’re constantly told to grow your list and ensure your numbers are going up, up and up. We agree a big list is a profitable list. If it’s well maintained and active, that is. If not, you’ll be sending emails that likely don’t receive opens and harm your deliverability more than anything.
So, what do you do?
First of all, why is list cleaning so important?
We touched on it a little before. However, list cleaning is vital for keeping your database healthy and responsive. After all, it’s one thing to have a large list, but if those customers aren’t taking desirable actions, then you’re essentially paying more than you need to be for your email marketing.
Above this, keeping a clean list ensures your emails don’t go to customers who are more likely to unsubscribe or mark your email as spam. Avoiding this guarantees your emails don’t start getting filtered to junk by inbox providers, as this would mean you become less and less likely to receive opens, clicks and orders.
How can a sunset flow help?
List cleaning is a time-consuming process that can take away from your campaign and flow work. Though, it needs to be done. A sunset flow can automate this process so you have more time to focus on the high-converting elements of your email marketing, such as your campaign strategy.
It can also confirm you don’t miss customers who need to be cleaned from your list, ensuring you’re only paying for valuable data.
How does a sunset flow work?
A sunset flow allows you to enrol customers who have been in your database for a set amount of time, but who have not opened, clicked or placed an order over a certain amount of time. For small goods, this may be a 365-day period. For larger purchases, such as furniture, this may be two to three years.
Once people enter into this flow, the purpose is to re-engage customers one more time. Sharp subject lines, such as “Is this a breakup?” or “Where have you been?” can help to win your customer’s attention quickly! Remember, these customers haven’t responded to your regular subject lines in a LONG time. So, it’s important to stay on brand. But also try strategies that can cut through quickly.
The email content in a sunset flow aims to allow customers to unsubscribe for themselves. Don’t limit it to just this, though. You can still include product recommendations or links to new arrivals. In case they have been busy this gives them an opportunity to re-engage and purchase.
If these customers still haven’t opened or clicked your emails after the sunset flow is complete, you can automatically assign a property on their profile to clearly identify who you can remove from your account. Once you’ve set this up, you can create a segment of people with this profile property and suppress it once a month to keep your billing down.
Need to keep your list clean?
If you don’t have time to figure out how to set all of this up, you can book in Our List Clean and Deliverability Health Check service and let the experts handle it for you.
