Posted by Gareth Cutter on 11th August 2009 to
Best Practice It’s not always easy being an email marketer (or any marketer for that matter!) when you’re facing an 80/20 split in your mailing list.
What does this mean? An 80/20 split is the average breakdown of contact names: for every 100 people you send messages to, 20% will interact with your company. Which begs the question from some quarters, ‘Why don’t we just email to more people?’
On first glance, it makes sense to do this: the more people you email, the more you can potentially sell to. However, this can be a false economy. Not all contacts are created equal, and just because you’re emailing more people, doesn’t mean the 80/20 split will remain the same. The quality of the data and the length of time you’ve been emailing to both will make a difference.
There are actually many positives to be drawn from working with an 80/20 split. Target your messages and appeal to the needs of that 20% who are showing themselves to be an engaged audience, and you can help increase average order value and frequency by encouraging their loyalty.
Another argument against rapidly inflating your mailing list is that it will be easier to segment the 80% of contacts who’ve yet to interact with your company at present into qualified stratas; those who are:
- Likely to be interested in future campaigns vs. those who aren’t
- Interested in personalised emails vs. generic special offers
- Would prefer to receive newsletters vs. promotional emails
In short, try to understand why that 80% have yet to interact with your company and find ways of encouraging them to do so. That way you won’t feel the need to start buying data left, right and centre to get the most out of an 80/20 split.
