The Past Is Prologue
During my dating days, I learned that pursuing someone who never showed any interest was a losing proposition. I’d call three times, then move on to the next prospect.
This is also my sales strategy, only now potential clients receive my free marketing newsletter every month as a gentle reminder. Sometimes I even hear from folks years later saying they’re finally ready to do business with me.
But how do you handle people not reading your newsletter? You clean house!
You see, I’m currently maintaining my mailing list of just under 5,000 names at Constant Contact. The monthly price I pay jumps once I hit that magic number, so it behooves me to periodically clear out the deadwood.
While preparing my next issue, I carefully examined those least engaged and found several dead people and a bunch of folks using multiple email addresses.
I also found a couple hundred people who haven’t opened my newsletter in a decade!
Obviously a mistake, right? After all, my newsletter is so informative and fun to read. How could that be?
As they said in “The Godfather”: “It’s not personal. It’s business.”
So I set my ego aside and deleted them all. This opened up room for the people signing up after reading one of my blogs or hearing me speak at a conference or Rotary luncheon.
Rather than leaving your communications efforts on autopilot, you may also find it useful to periodically clean out your mailing list. It will probably remind you of some clients with whom you haven’t spoken in a while, and will certainly save you some money along the way.
Because odds are excellent that you have deadwood in your list too, and sometimes the best way to clean it out is to sort through names by hand. After all, if they haven’t read your stuff in the past 10 years, they’re probably never going to read it.
And here’s something else to consider: Even if you’re not near another tier at your mailing list house, cleaning outdated prospects from your list automatically improves your response rates because you’re not sending your mailings to disinterested recipients.
And wouldn’t it be nice to know that you’re actually talking to the people who want to hear from you?
With that said, I wish you a week of profitable marketing.
Add your name to my list. www.marketbuilding.com.