B2B Email Marketing: Engaged vs Unengaged Contacts

Today I want to cover a very important subject matter in the life of an event marketeer, or for that matter, in any B2B marketeer. But this is a very, very painful and sometimes difficult to digest discussion when you're talking with an event business leader. And this is all a topic about engaged versus unengaged contacts. And just to give a little bit of context, the lifeblood, there's no mistake, the lifeblood of an organization specifically for an event business is the contact database. Because event businesses predominantly focus, if not hundred, about at least 90% of their efforts into email marketing. So the work that is done through the process of improving your email marketing responses is big and it's huge. And we always come to the situation where we find a database, which in this case we're going to use a glass of milk. And the description that we have here is we have half of this glass is representative on engaged. Yeah, contacts, and these guys are engaged. So depending on the business leader that we're talking about or depending on the strategist that is responsible for deciding what are we going to do about our email marketing. And with regards to our unengaged contacts, I would like to offer some views as to how I see it and where the focus should be and when we're looking at engagements on Engage, where your attention should be made. And I hope that this is valuable for many of you out there. So about 50% on average. About 50%. Let's just kind of generalize a little bit. But with our clients, normally 50% of the contact database that they are able to email is made out of a list of contacts that are unengaged. And for all terms and purposes, unengaged contacts represent or unengaged contacts are those people that have not opened, clicked, or for that matter, engage with any of your email marketing activity. Right. And obviously, if you send, if you have a database of 10,000 contacts, then that pretty much means that around 5,000 of those people are not hearing your message. In fact, they're not actually doing anything with it. And we're talking about a good measurement of or spotting these unengaged individuals. We're looking at at least six months of not having any contact. So we're just giving ample time. And in the context of an event business, 6 months of email marketing messages means that very likely they have not engaged with any of the marketing of your newsletters or any of the events that you have been promoting. Right. So now let's just look at this kind of aspect. So, okay, what are we going to do with the question, how do we engage these guys? Right. And when you look at how do we engage these guys, we're looking at, okay, strategies where you're going to look at, okay, let's do a re engagement campaign where you put all these individuals and start doing activities, 2, 3, 4, 5 emails to try to entice them to come to attend or to come or to engage with your content. The reality is that, and we have done various experiments where you take these unengaged contacts and you send an email, email marketing campaign specifically saying, hey, we haven't seen you for six months. Are you still part of this journey? Are you still want to be? You will normally have a percentage of people that are going to respond to that. Right. But that percentage is very, very, very low. Right. 0.0. Sometimes I've seen 0.1 even less. You know, so in a context of 10,000 contacts, 5,000 contacts, you might have two, three or four people responding to it. Understandably, we're going to have leaders and strategists saying, hang on, but these guys are still important. We are. These unengaged lists are people that are still kind of intending to operate with us. And I have no dispute with that. But the question is, from the strategic point of view is what do you do with it? Okay, we're going to focus on engaging this guy. So obviously you go into strategy of re engagement campaign. Yeah. Where you're going to start chasing all that little group of people that are going to do so. Try to get more and more before you do. But remember that you have, if you're using an email system or using a marketing automation system, these contacts are costing you money. Right. So think about all that money that you, that you're spending there. Right. So you're going to have a re engagement campaign. You're going to start thinking about delete or not delete from the database. So that means that you're going to have to spend certain amount of time analyzing this data and then you're going to have to start looking at, okay, what else do we do? And then a lot of organizations then do is what we call revenue research of this data. And when I'm talking about the re research, we're talking about taking all the emails of these individuals that have been there and literally sourcing a provider or sourcing a company or someone internally in the business is going to kind of actually revalidate and recheck all those contacts to try to get to understand who are the new individuals that represent potential contacts in that organization. To validate who the new contact is, or if it was a bounce, then just to refresh it. And in my opinion, this ends up being a very costly exercise, A very costly exercise in terms of time and money, right? Because we are actually focusing on how do we engage the unengaged and what I normally offer. And where I know we should need to look at this is from the angle, why don't we look at the engaged contacts, right? Why don't we start thinking about how instead of saying how do we engage? So we're saying how do we nurture these contacts? How do we make sure that we're chasing the winners and making sure that those that are engaged with us, how do we ensure that we're trying to look at additional ways to get them to respond? Because the goal in this particular area is how do we engage? Which in essence is we're chasing clicks, we're chasing getting them to engage. Whereas when we look at this, how do we nurture these particular individuals? And by the way, when someone is engaged, I mean they're opening your emails and everything, we're still going to have around 5 to 10% of this group of people are actually doing proper engagement. When I'm talking about proper engagement, in my book, an open doesn't mean anything to me. What it means is a click to your website, that means a reply to that email. That is what I'm saying. Meaningful engagement. Meaningful engagement means that what are they doing after they visit your site? Are they staying there? Are they bouncing back? Because if they're bouncing back, even despite them clicking on your email, that means absolutely nothing, right? So the goal here is how do we nurture and how do we chase the sale, right? Which might well be an event ticket or a subscription, right? And I think that is kind of the elements where I'm thinking, okay, so if we're chasing the winners, what do we do to chase the winner and to progress into the sell? And then here is when we're looking at, okay, let's just do offer value at content, why don't we try to give these guys a call? Why don't we invite these people to say, a webinar? Why don't we look at alternative ways to segment this 50% of engaged contacts further by job title, by the pages they visited on your website by a variety of means. And what I'm saying is that focusing on chasing the winners and progressing to the sale, every single effort of time and money that you are going to be intending to do is geared towards making more Money. Right. And it's geared towards making, you know, as being more efficient because you're saving time, you're not spending so much time on that. And I think this is an important element where if you as a business leader or you as a B2B marketeer are the sort of person that are looking at half glass empty or half glass full, you really need to kind of review where are you going to be investing your time over the next two, three to six months. Because marketeers and startups or growing businesses are everyone in the business's time poor. And we're in a situation where we really need to optimize and maximize the time that we're spending. And where are we spending our time? I definitely know where I'm spending my time within my business. I definitely know where I am suggesting where my clients should spend the time investing in their business. That doesn't mean that you're not going to spend time looking to try to get the unengaged to engage. But my simple strategy to work with the unengaged is just basically do a three times email engagement campaign where you just literally ask these individuals, A haven't seen you for a long time, are you still alive? Kind of thing. B, what you're going to say to them is kind of are you still there? And in our context we're just going to send them, you know, we've recently released XYZ content and the last one is, look, clearly you're not responding to any message that we send. We're going to delete you from your database. Yeah, that's step number one. And I would just not worry about these guys anymore. I wouldn't even spend time trying to re research these individuals because by the time you spend money researching these guys, you would have spent that money on advertising, on LinkedIn, advertising, Facebook, PPC, creating a new piece of content. Whatever you decide is going to be the right strategy. But I wouldn't waste more money. And the other thing that I would do, I would potentially put this non engaged contact into a remarketing list because what that means is that, well, their email addresses are not right or anything like that. There will probably be some connection out there because they would have visited your site. The fact that they have not opened your email doesn't mean that they're not visiting your site, doesn't mean that they're not so. And I will put this content into a remarketing campaign or creating some audiences within Facebook PPC or remarking tools so that you are actually trying to get that attention elsewhere through their behavior online. And then I would just then follow just particularly focusing on this last part, which is ultimately why businesses exist. Chasing the winners, looking at the engaged contacts and how I'm going to progress the sale, I wouldn't worry about chasing a click. I want to chase the sale. And I hope that you find this useful too. Thank you.