Interested, attentive and active newsletter subscribers are always the goal in permission marketing. In reality, this is contradicted by a number of mostly non-specific and irrelevant advertising messages, intruding upon us at every opportunity. So, how is it possible to increase relevance, tackle interest and enthuse individual recipients in a sustainable way?

Publishers and media need to rethink

Merely focussing on the scope is no longer enough, up to 50% of subscribers who are targeted by the deluge of email marketing 1.0 are completely inactive. This means, they neither read the newsletters nor the advertising messages of the provider. Against this background of the changing marketing mechanisms and success-oriented online advertising, this represents an extremely poor investment. So it is time to shed light on the quality rating in terms of accuracy, response and customer value.

Active lifecycle management secures advantage in competition

The solution is relevant news at the right time and in the right frequency. This may sound easy, however, it is a challenge which requires a sophisticated analysis of user activity and pro-active management of the subscribers lifecycles. It is vital to recognise decreasing interest at an early stage in order to avoid unsubscribes as a reaction to irrelevant content or excessive email contact.
What has been realised in ecommerce for a long time, thanks to methods such as RFM (Recency Frequency Monetary) parameters, hardly happens anymore with publishers, media and marketers. However, precise knowledge about subscribers, their preferences, interests and involvements are the basis of valuable permission marketing.
Activity-based scoring methods and segmenting models, which control the frequency of mailings and carry out triggered campaigns, help to secure the potential in email marketing in the long run.

Technologies for lifecycle management

It has become clear, that for example, individually preferred frequency can differ. Incorrect control of content and frequency can lead to a rapid decrease in subscribers’ interests and after a phase of low activity, it mostly ends in unsubscribes or even spam complaints. Here, intelligent technologies and a clever communication strategy can help:

  • Interests and activities can be measured and drawn upon as weighted analysis criteria.
  • Highly affine subscribers can be recognised and dealt with differently in regard to frequency and activity control than users with low involvement.
  • Transaction emails, such as subscribe confirmations or community status reports as comprehensive activity measuring should always be an integral part of email marketing systematics, in order to transmit additional offers in the case of high interest.
  • Targeted call-to-action elements help to train active performance.

Active subscribers as a strategic value

The potentials that lie in the professional management of subscribers lifecycles is shown by the media group RTL Deutschland. Here, all subscribers of the different portals are centrally managed via the in-house marketer IP Deutschland.
The coaction of editorial newsletters, marketing-oriented advantage emails and targeted activations has already increased the number of active subscribers by more than 30%.
This not only results in interested recipients, who access the content of portals more often from newsletters, but also improves the success ratios for marketing clients. In addition, open and click rates are significantly higher than the average in comparable B2C marketing.