Customer Engagement Indicator:
Open rates provide insight into how well you are maintaining a relationship with your subscribers. A healthy open rate shows that recipients are still engaged with your content. On the other hand, declining open rates can indicate growing disinterest or dissatisfaction among your audience, signaling potential churn or that your subscriber list has become stale or irrelevant.
Report an outdated or stale contact list:
Declining open rates can also suggest that your email list has become stale. Some contacts may no longer use the email addresses they originally provided, while others may have lost interest in your content over time but haven’t unsubscribed. As a result, emails are sent to people who aren’t active participants in your campaigns, dragging down your overall open rate.
Steps to clean your email list:
Inactive User Segment:
A key strategy to combat declining open rates is to segment inactive users, those who have not opened or interacted with your emails in a specific period of time. These contacts may be disengaged for a variety of reasons, such as changing interests or overly frequent communications. By identifying this group, you can create re-engagement campaigns tailored to pique their interest again.
Run targeted re-engagement campaigns:
Try sending personalized, targeted content to re-engage inactive users. This could be a veterinary email list special offer, a survey to understand their needs, or a reminder of the value they get from being on your list. Experiment with different subject lines and tones to see what works best to capture their attention.
If your re-engagement efforts are failing, it may be time to consider removing these unresponsive contacts from your list. While it may seem counterintuitive to reduce the size of your email list, keeping unengaged subscribers hurts more than it helps, as it reduces open rates, degrades sender reputation, and wastes resources.
Signal 2# High bounce rates
Bounce rate in email marketing refers to the percentage of emails that are returned (or “bounced”) as undeliverable after being sent to recipients. These undeliverable emails fall into two categories: hard bounces and soft bounces. Understanding the distinction between these two types of bounces is essential to improving email deliverability and maintaining a healthy contact list.
Types of Bounce Rate
Hard Bounces:
A hard bounce occurs when an email is returned as permanently undeliverable. This typically happens for reasons such as:
The recipient's email address is invalid or no longer in use.
The domain name does not exist.