Beyond the subscriber count: why engagement is the key to destination marketing success

As a destination marketing organization (DMO), you know the importance of attracting visitors to your destination. Email marketing is a powerful tool that can help you achieve this goal.

While building a large subscriber list might seem like a significant achievement, it’s not just about quantity but quality. A large list of inactive subscribers is less valuable than a smaller, highly engaged audience.

Let’s explore why.
 

1. Improved Deliverability

Internet service providers (ISPs) are expecting more from senders. They have sophisticated algorithms that prioritize emails sent to engaged subscribers. Gone are the days when you could send to a large list with little to no engagement. If you want to keep your emails out of the spam folders or from being filtered, then you must prioritize sending your emails to engaged subscribers.

Tip: Have an ongoing re-engagement campaign running in the background. This way the main list you send to is always populated with the most up-to-date engaged subscribers.

2. Higher Conversion Rates

Engaged subscribers are more likely to open, click, and ultimately convert. They’re actively interested in your destination, which leads to clicking on your calls to action (CTAs) to your website where they can explore your destination further.

Tip: You can use two different methods to determine who your engaged subscribers are. First, you can look at a combination of subscribers who have either opened or clicked on at least one message and ones that aren’t new. The second method is using that in addition to subscribers who visited your website, completed forms, or entered an automated welcome program.

3. Data-Driven Insights

Engaged subscribers provide a wealth of valuable data through their interactions that can be used to refine your marketing strategies and improve your overall rates. Analyzing their interactions with your emails can give you deeper insights into their preferences, behaviors, and interests. You can use this data to segment your audience, personalize content, optimize timing, and refine messaging. As mentioned above, engaged subscribers lead to higher open and click-through rates which puts you in a better position with ISPs to land in the inbox.

Tip: Use A/B testing to determine which subject lines, content, and CTAs resonate the most with your subscribers. Monitor open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and click-to-open rates (CTOR) to find the best-performing ones.

4. Reducing Liability

By regularly cleaning your lists of inactive or unengaged subscribers, you reduce the risk of spam complaints. These may show up when subscribers don’t remember signing up for your emails or (at times) as an easier way to unsubscribe. Behavior like this as well as sending to unengaged subscribers, can harm your reputation.

Tip: Using tools like Google Postmaster, you can see your rate of spam complaints over time. If you notice spikes around the same time you send out your emails, look closely at who you are sending to. Is it time to run a re-engagement campaign? Are you sending to your engaged audience only and not also to your unengaged audience at a different time?
 

By prioritizing engagement, you can improve your deliverability, keep your sender reputation high, boost your conversion rates, and gain valuable insights about your subscribers. You can use these insights to implement strategies like ongoing re-engagement campaigns, A/B testing, and segmentation.

Bonus tip: Don’t worry about the size of your list. Instead, get excited to see higher conversion rates for your destination with a smaller, more engaged list.