While it’s a no-brainer that your hottest leads are the highest priority and warrant attention, what about the rest of your contacts whose interaction with your email campaigns is just so-so? With email interaction becoming an increasingly important consideration in keeping your status as a white-listed email marketer, should you continue to send emails, even though their lack of engagement can chip away at your reputation as an above board email marketer?

This question is a tricky one, because removing them from your list could eliminate these leads from becoming a potential customer, but keeping them on your list could damage your email marketing integrity. While you rarely want to completely remove a contact from your database (unless of course, they’ve opted out), you can use your marketing automation software to create segments of “cooler” contacts that you communicate with on a less frequent basis.

Right now, stop what you’re doing and take a moment to define what constitutes a more (or less) qualified prospect in your organization. This discussion can be quite ‘animated’ to say the least because sales may be rejecting leads from marketing as unqualified, while marketing thinks sales should be…well…selling. Once you’ve navigated this slippery slope, bridged this communication gap and defined the characteristics of qualified leads (ta da!), it makes sense to segment these leads from the cooler ones. With differing levels of interest, these segments within your database should receive customized streams of communications. Leads that are cooler could receive more educationally focused information such as newsletters and product updates, while more qualified prospects could go into a nurturing campaign to receive more frequent communications that are relevant to their areas of interest.

By thinking of more than just your hottest prospects, you’ll be able to further segment your database into lists associated with different levels of interest and readiness. Once these lists are in place, you can send communications at a pace that feels more comfortable and tailored to each segment of leads. Your lead database will remain in good shape, you’ll keep your integrity intact as an email marketer – and the most interested prospects will rise to the top – making your lead nurturing efforts shine.