Email marketing can be a supremely frustrating experience. A marketer will send an email to 5,000 recipients only to discover that only a couple hundred or so opened it, and only a small handful actually followed the links to their website.
In a recent article, Marketing Sherpa shined a new light on some of the more irritating aspects of email marketing. Non Responders May Still Love Getting Your Email is based on relatively primitive research techniques, but it nonetheless gives email marketers some hope for their future job security.
New anecdotal evidence from MarketingSherpa’s own experiences suggest, however, that nonresponders may not be as big a problem as you think. Our editorial team conducted a test that every marketer should consider; we picked up the phone and called some nonresponders. “Why don’t you open anymore? Why don’t you click?”
The most common answer shocked us. “I do. I like your email. Don’t stop sending it. I may not always have time to read it, but I want it.”
So perhaps all those hours spent putting together that email blast were not wasted after all. Well, maybe. It would be nice to see some more actual research on the subject.
The problem with non responders is that you do not really have any indication of what they think about your business and your emails. If someone visits every link on your email, then you know they probably like getting your messages. If they mark you as spam, then you know just the opposite. But when someone fails to respond one way or the other, then they are stuck in e-marketing no-man’s-land.
A good assumption to live by is that if a recipient has not opted out or marked you as spam, then they must have at least some interest in receiving your emails or they just don’t check their inbox very often. Either way it is a pretty safe bet that you can continue to email such people without fear of a major backlash.