Competitions can be a great way to increase your subscriber list and get your recipients actively involved with your mailings – if done correctly.

It’s also come to my attention that if done incorrectly, it can water down your recipient list and effectively make your own life harder.

I’m not going to name names on this post but a well know Manchester-based clothing company send me emails regarding sales and new seasons etc.  So far, all relevant emails that I pretty much always open.  They also send their loyal mailing list competitions, when they are on – still all well and good.

The problem I get is when I do fancy entering their competitions and have to enter my name and address into the application form, is that it says I’m not allowed to enter as my name is already on their mailing list.

Now I’m unsure whether this is poor planning on their behalf or a deliberate attempt at list growth.  Either way, it is massively floored and results in poor list growth for them.

If you want to enter a competition and you’re told you can’t enter with your original details, what do you do?  Enter in some other details of course.

This ultimately leads to list growth for the company, but of the wrong kind.  They’re not really reaching new customers, but a combination of customers browsing the site and current recipients who are entering alternative details. 

The list will become watered down with additional, not necessarily inactive but un useful subscribers.  It will make reading campaign statistics a lot more inaccurate than it could be, and this of course will affect their future decisions regarding their campaigns.

What you should try and do is avoid linking your main mailing list with these new competitions and make a separate one for such activities.  Then you can collect data, send out to the winner, and then add any additional emails to your subscriber list.

The morale is to think ahead with ideas such as this as it can turn a potentially positive move into a quite destructive move for your lists.

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I was going through my personal inbox the other day and doing my daily deletes and reads of emails and then realised what I had actually done – become an inactive subscriber.

I’d never really thought about it from the subscribers’ point of view so had a think about it.  The newsletters in question were a couple of large online record stores that I subscribed to years ago when I used to buy a lot of vinyl.

Since then though, I have moved away from that and don’t really need the emails anymore.  Then I started to question why I hadn’t actually unsubscribed myself from the list.  Granted, a big part was due to laziness but there was a part of me that thought that I may be interested in it at some point and therefore didn’t want to unsubscribe at the moment.

The problem is, I’ve been like that for quite a while and they still haven’t sent anything which has reignited my interest in their newsletter.

If you’re reading this and think that a big proportion of your mailing list could be in the same category as me, it might be time to start a re-activation campaign.

I personally think this is something which should be carried out at least twice a year.  This keeps you staying fresh with your email marketing campaigns and stops you falling into a rut of the same formulated emails each time.

Instead of just one re-subscribe email though, I propose a quick series of emails.  This way as well you can carry out a bit of passive segmentation on your mailing list.

A few ideas for you -

A promotional offer to get non openers back is always a good start.  Who do you know who doesn’t like discounts, vouchers or special offers?

It could be worth going down the personalised subject header route if you’re not doing it already.  Try to grab their attention again in a cluttered inbox.

Using a current topic as the basis for your email could ignite your apathetic subscribers’ interest again.  Try to keep it relevant to your target market though.  Once opened, hit them with a re-subscribe offer.

Some of these people though just may not require your products/services anymore.  This doesn’t mean they won’t open your email still.  In this situation, it is worth a prominent forward this offer to a friend button to try and counter that inactive subscriber with potential new subscribers.

If you get no response from these people after your series, it may very well be time to call a day on them and remove them from your list.  Though your list will deflate, in essence they were never there anyway.  Furthermore, it will allow you to get more accurate statistics from your active subscribers

Yes, so we’ve been beavering away to construct a “beginners guide” series to email marketing with emphasis being placed best practice right from the start.

We’re also trying to make all the terminology make absolute sense so that all you new comers know what we’re talking about when we say A/B Split Testing and Domain/IP Reputation.

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Hope it helps!