Pandemic Email Audience Changes: Managing the Risks and Opportunities

List building has been challenging over the past 18 months, which has now made managing subscribers a challenge. Before talking about the issues that are pressing now, let’s look at how we got here…

When coronavirus lockdowns started in March last year, consumer behaviors started to rapidly evolve. Many stores were closed and many people didn’t want to go to the stores that were open, which heavily impacted subscriber acquisition efforts in those settings and shifted most list growth to online signups. Grocery delivery exploded in popularity, and ecommerce as a percentage of retail sales gained several year’s worth of growth in several weeks. Roughly half of the people who had never bought anything online made their first online purchase ever during those early weeks. Retailers and restaurants hastily rolled out curbside pickup and same-day delivery to try to serve online customers better. Meanwhile, widespread out-of-stocks had people shopping around and trying new brands at record levels. Layer on top of that massive shifts in employment and considerable urban flight.

Stating the obvious, that’s a lot of change. And it’s change that has posed risks in terms of not being able to adapt to subscribers’ evolving needs and then losing them, but also presented opportunities in terms of gaining brand new customers who have been driven to try new brands. The next phase of change is upon us and presents similar risks and opportunities…

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