Thanks to Gmail’s new spam guidelines, email and CRM marketers are in a pickle. The list management practices keeping them under spam thresholds means subscriber volume will likely decrease over time.
As if that isn’t enough, iOS 15 continues to throw a wrench into the works: Any marketers using open rates to measure engagement try to make sense of a murky picture.
So, what do we advise clients do about subscriber acquisition and management?
Let’s get into it.
Post-acquisition list management
Generally speaking, our major suggestions for brands to use for new subscribers are: 1) set (or tighten) standards for when to remove people from ongoing sends, and a couple of) arrange stronger automations based on user engagement.
For standards, note that new subscribers who haven’t yet established a record of engagement are your riskiest segment, recency-wise. For this reason, brands must discover each early engagers and non-engagers.
The non-engagers needs to be approached with a slow warm-up campaign. That needs to start before happened before the new guidelines got here out. (For instance, should you used to wait a 12 months for users to engage, consider segmenting them into non-engagement lists in six months. In other words, should you’re going to fail, fail fast to mitigate your spam risk.)
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As you construct systems to discover engaged and non-engaged users, remember iOS 15 makes open rates an unreliable metric. Gmail users checking their mail on iPhones won’t register accurate open rates. Use click metrics as a substitute — yes, there are fewer of those, but you’ll be able to depend on the information with rather more confidence.
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The other piece — automations — is essential for moving new subscribers definitively into an engaged segment. Setting up automations based on forms of engagement (e.g. site visits, products viewed, recipes viewed for CPG brands) increases the worth of messages sent to new users. This creates a pleasant, positive cycle: the larger your list of engaged users gets, the more often you’ll be able to send them messages — and the more latitude you might have to drive new customer acquisition.
Using acquisition to balance subscriber erosion
The bad news about organising your system to fail fast is opening yourself to subscriber decreases. The excellent news is that being more sure about your standards and giving yourself firm guardrails means you’ll be able to be more aggressive about new subscriber acquisition.
Once the tighter standards are in place, set a revised acquisition goal. For instance, try to grow your list by 10% in the subsequent month, and monitor how things shake out. Without a system to segment unengaged users and balance the loss with acquisitions, you’ll set yourself up to dump a bunch of users abruptly once you get red-flagged for spam.
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List acquisition and strict segmentation is an evergreen, regenerative approach that may smooth out any peaks and valleys — and keep you out of tough conversations along with your leadership team. It also means you’ll be able to take a responsible approach to acquisition as a substitute of counting on shortcuts like list-sharing and list-buying, which leads to irrelevant users and better spam risks.
The role of personalization in adherence to spam guidelines
Your single biggest ally in keeping new users in your engaged segment is personalization — when it comes to each message content and scheduling. Use a welcome series to capture signals that assist you to construct a profile and personalize emails accordingly. For instance, if a user interacts with family-oriented or kid-oriented content, capture that information for future sends.
You can put preference centers into play to ask users to offer you their interests proactively, but few people will. It doesn’t move the needle as much as systems in place which might be picking up their cues.
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If not one of the above advice is especially earth-shattering, good — it’s gleaned from best email marketing practices. Even though it’s logical advice, we rarely see brands coming to us with those fundamentals firmly in place. Use this as a cue to take a tough take a look at your list segmentation systems, your automations and personalizations, and your reliance on open rates. If you do, you’ll find plenty of the way to improve your odds of staying on the best side of Gmail’s guidelines.
The post How to get new subscribers while navigating Gmail’s new spam rules appeared first on MarTech.
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