Why does my email marketing response rate continue to drop?

Falling response rates to ongoing e-mail marketing promotions is a concern of many businesses who gather e-mail addresses and leads on their web sites. Even when you have the gone to great lengths to ensure your e-mail program is opt-in you may find your e-mail response rates continue to fall.

I have conducted research that shows e-mail marketing response rates trail off after about eight transmissions. This fall off in email marketing response rates happens to even the best lists of buying customers, newsletter sign ups, catalog requests and other high quality sources.

A graph of email marketing response rates usually looks something like this:

However, this neat clean graph of an isolated segment tracked over time is not what most businesses see when looking at their overall e-mail marketing response rates. That is because most businesses tend to throw all their e-mail addresses into a single pot and look at them as a single entity much like they do with mailing lists.

As a result they see their email marketing response rates for new customers and leads mushed in with names that are sometimes months or even years older.

How can you deal with this perceived fall off in email marketing response rates?

1. segment your email names by recency
2. develop an email messaging sequence
3. focus your creative efforts on your first 4 transmissions

All of which means you have to look at your new names differently than your old ones are treat them differently.

Based on the response graph above your first 6 emails sent give you 80% of all your lifetime response.

It only makes sense to treat new customers and registrations with greater care and creativity.

Unfortunately, many businesses who do not effectively segment react to decreasing email marketing response rates the wrong way. Such as… offering deeper and deeper discounts and incentives to get overall response rates up, spending less time on creative because the ROI is going down, and worst… increasing the frequency of their email sending.

Most of these tactics do nothing more than accelerate the law of diminishing returns for an email list. However, there is a worse problem lurking just below the surface.

Because most business treat their email marketing list as a single entity and don’t properly segment their email lists all the deep discounting, lower quality creative are being applied to their newly added names as well as to the older names. This will have the compounding effect of decreasing email marketing response rates for the first 4-6 transmissions which account for 80% of lifetime response.

So, remember the three points mentioned above:

1. segment your email names by recency
2. develop an email messaging sequence
3. focus your creative efforts on your first 4 transmissions