As a business owner, you want your marketing to be effective. That means it grabs the attention of your target audience, it educates them on why they should use your product/services and they jump willingly into your sales pipeline as a new lead. Marketing engagement is key.

If people don’t engage you have two choices:

• Continue trying to engage them
• Dump ‘em

Let’s look at the options.

Continue trying to engage

Adding a few more people to a mailing list (because you’ve got their business cards or connected on LinkedIn) doesn’t take long and doesn’t cost you anything, but let’s think about this more carefully.

• They are consuming your mental energy because you believe there is still an opportunity for a sale with at least some of them.
• You spend time liking, retweeting and responding to social media posts. Time that is a scarce resource.
• Adding them to your mailing lists impacts your marketing stats, making open/clickthrough rates lower than they should be.

Dump ‘Em

If you simply remove them from your mailing lists (what member rating do they have in MailChimp?) and stop engaging with their social media, you have that most precious resource to invest in those who are engaging.

Those who are engaging with you want to know more. They want you to talk to them and they are far more likely to buy from you.

The consequences

Let’s think about all of this:

Who would you rather invest your time in? Those who are engaged are likely to buy from you and your time is far better spent on them. Which is a safer bet: 3:1 or 50:1?

There is a slim chance that those who aren’t currently engaged will come back to you. It may be that they aren’t ready to buy from you just yet. I know I’ve suggested you take them off your mailing list (GDPR and all that), but you haven’t cut all ties. You may still be following them on Twitter and you may still be connected on LinkedIn. What’s more, by giving your time and mental effort to those more engaged, you ensure your business is still around when others return.