Thursday, June 25, 2009

Separating your Marketing Database into Active/Inactive


One of the most important goals of Lead Nurturing is to maintain permission to stay in front of your audience with your communications. Data from Marketing Sherpa on content relevance and unsubscribes has shown that many prospects will not necessarily click on an unsubscribe link when they lose interest in your messaging. However, far worse, they may become emotionally unsubscribed, reflexively ignoring and deleting your messages as they arrive.

If you continue a rapid pace of marketing to this emotionally unsubscribed segment, they may at some point click the “this is spam” button, causing you a significant deliverability headache, even if they had originally subscribed legitimately.

The first step in avoiding this situation is to identify the inactive members of your database.

To do this within Eloqua is very easy. Using an Inactivity filter, you can look for contacts who are showing less than a certain amount of activity. A recommended technique is to build a group called “Inactive Contacts”. By looking for contacts who have had no clickthroughs, no web visits, no form submits, and less than a few email opens in the past few months (preview panes may still render an open for someone reflexively deleting your email in a few email clients), you can define a group of inactive contacts.

It’s recommended to regenerate this group every month or quarter in order to ensure that you capture any newly inactive contacts, or allow any contacts showing a resurgence of interest to leave the group.

With this group defined, you can then suppress them against regular email distributions, in order to ensure that they are not communicated to more than they would appreciate. Depending on their level of disengagement, you can target them with special re-engagement offers, or campaigns using other media types such as direct mail or a calling campaign.

The critical point, however, is to identify and monitor the inactive segment of your database. By understanding its size and any trends in its growth, you can begin to understand how your messaging is resonating with your audience, and adjust accordingly.

1 comments:

Reet said...

This topic is so timely. I am going to start doing this next week. Thanks.

And I can't for Eloqua to enable the contact filter feature where I can combine implict and explicit information for deeper segmenatation.