Marketing Automation: Why Spend 20% More Than You Need?
If you could spend 20% less on your monthly marketing automation bills, without switching to a new platform or doing any extra work, would you? It’s an easy and obvious yes for most of us. Managing an efficient and cost-effective marketing strategy is a top priority for businesses of all sizes. However, as your business grows and your email volume increases, so does the cost. In this post, we’re going to talk about how to cut down your marketing spend, while boosting your Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER).
How pricing works for most marketing automation platforms
First, a quick catch-up on how pricing works: marketing platforms like Klaviyo, MailChimp, SailThru, etc. help automate and optimize email campaigning efforts based on your business’ specific needs. Traditionally, these platforms offer a pricing model based on the number of contacts in your account and the number of messages you send. The more contacts you have and messages you send, the higher the pricing tier you will fall into. For larger businesses with high-volume sending or unique requirements, there are custom pricing options. To sum it up: cost is based on volume.
Reducing the bill
Now, here's where you can start trimming down that bill. Just because someone is in your contact list, doesn't necessarily mean they are worth messaging. There may be duplicate profiles, junk accounts, unengaged, or seasonal customers in your contact list (we’ll dive further into what those are momentarily). By figuring out how many of your profiles aren’t actually active, you may be able to downgrade your plan and save some cash. Klaviyo’s pricing calculator can help you figure out how much money your business can save by downgrading. In addition to cutting costs and boosting MER, maintaining a pristine contact email list offers the advantage of enhanced deliverability, reducing the likelihood of your domain being flagged as spam.
But how are you supposed to know what counts as an inactive profile?
Generally, these profiles fall into 4 categories:
Duplicate profiles: Say you have a subscriber who forgot their sign-in information, so they created a second account. Or a customer who created a second account because they wanted to use a “first-time customer” free shipping code for a second time. Now, you’re paying to email two separate addresses that belong to the same person. These are called duplicate profiles. By getting rid of these duplicates, you can consolidate your contact list and make sure that your email communications are precise and relevant.
Junk accounts: These intrusive profiles typically include spam accounts, fake email addresses that customers use to perform tests, and email addresses generated from abandoned cart bots on Shopify or other integrated platforms (software that is designed to track and follow up with users who have added items to their online shopping carts but have not completed the checkout process). These accounts can negatively impact your MER unless you get ahead of them and remove them from your contact list (bye-bye scammers!).
Unengaged profiles: These accounts consistently show little to no interaction with your emails. There could be many different reasons why customers never open the emails you send them (lack of interest, irrelevant content for the receiver, etc). Cutting out those profiles to focus on engaged subscribers allows you to tailor your messaging and ultimately increase open and click-through rates.
Seasonal profiles: While your marketing platform charges you for contacts all year round, many of your customers are not open to your messaging that entire time. Some are only engaged around the holiday season, Mother’s Day, or Back to School. This group is the trickiest and most labor intensive to activate and suppress manually, but the cost savings could be significant.
Creating a clear-cut list with all the duplicate, junk, unengaged, and seasonal profiles in your contacts simplifies the process of removing accounts and cutting costs on whichever platform you use. Some platforms, like Klaviyo and Mailchimp, even allow you to suppress accounts in bulk by importing a CSV or Excel file containing the list of profiles you want to remove. Machine-based platforms like Orita can even handle all the complicated formulas, number crunching, and boring data analysis to create the list for you, so you don’t have to stress about taking the time to do it manually. For more detail, see an example of how Digital Dream Labs’ reduced their marketing bill by 37% with our software. On average, Orita’s data confidence platform lowers brands’ marketing bills by 20%, increasing their MER, and ensuring that they’re generating meaningful results every time they hit send.
To learn more about how Orita can help you reduce your marketing spend, schedule a call with us.
