A reduction in your active subscribers other than bounced and unsubscribed subscribers.
Not all subscribers are active
Let's say you have a list of 10,000 subscribers and an open rate of 50% - pretty good for a business to consumer list. Upon further analysis over the past 6 months:
- 25% open it every time - your hard core subscribers
- 45% open it occasionally
- 30% never open the email
In this example, active subscribers are 7,000 (70%). The other 30% might be on your list, but they are providing you with no value.
List fatigue is a movement of your subscribers from active to inactive. It is a quiet, but real reduction in your list size.
What causes list fatigue?
- Subscribers changing their email address
- Over-sending
- Non relevant emails
Change of email address
Also known as list churn, for business to consumer lists a typical yearly rate is 20-30% - (yes, that much!). Business to business lists have lower churn because business emails change less often.
For example, if you have a list of 1,000 people, you may lose 300 subscribers during the year simply from changing email addresses. You may not see this in your bounces or unsubscribes because many people simply stop checking their old email accounts.
Over sending
Over sending is in the eyes of the subscriber. If they think you are over-sending, you are over-sending. Your subscribers are not homogeneous, some might prefer to receive emails less often and you should accommodate them.
Non relevant emails
Discussed previously in the A.R.T. article, non relevant emails are the best way to irritate subscribers and turn them from active subscribers to non-active subscribers. It doesn't take many non-relevant emails for a person to decide to start ignoring them.
What you can do
Focus on quality of emails and not quantity.
A quantity mentality will degrade your list over time.
A.R.T.
Send relevant, anticipated emails. As long as your emails are highly relevant, your list fatigue will be much less than the industry standard.
Frequency options
Give your subscribers a frequency option.
Maybe they'd like to receive a monthly email instead of every week. Or maybe once a quarter versus every month. Options are good, free, and easy - so provide them to your subscribers and they will grace you with their active participation.
Remove inactive subscribers
Send a special email to the subscribers who haven't opened an email in many months. Tell them you haven't seen them in awhile and that you are considering removing them from your list. Provide a link for them to confirm they still want to receive emails and ignore if not. Better yet, provide a new frequency option to receive emails less often. After this email, remove those who didn't update their profile. You'll be better off with a smaller, more active list.
The next article will provide a real world example of list fatigue experienced by an actual email marketer.
