You should not always, if ever, go for the safe option in email marketing. It is a very crowded market and with the high street suffering and online sales taking up what little slack there is, it is probable that more and more companies will look to email marketing to see them through the current difficult times. Competition will be fierce, or rather even fiercer than it is currently.

You need to try and get as much profit from those on your email lists as you can. If you take the easy option of not pushing them you will be left behind. It might seem difficult to work out just what the potential of each subscriber is. That is where email marketing software can come to your rescue.

There will be a norm which defines a certain kind of subscriber. They will have a set life expectancy and will go through various phases until they become inactive. Having this identified by your email marketing software allows you to intercede at specific points to ensure that you keep them in line.

It does more though. It also allows you to investigate them. Take a percentage of one type of subscriber to your email lists and change the way you work with them. Push them a little or maybe more. Try and maximise their potential to buy, perhaps increasing the frequency of the emails or their value. You will need to exercise care as we do not want to decimate your email list although it is almost certain that some will click the unsubscribe button. This is an unfortunate fact of email marketing: it is all about balance.

Then comes the easy bit. You have to work out if the loss of subscribers is compensated by the increase in revenue. You will then know whether your experimental method should be tried with the whole of that email list.

Another unfortunate fact is that it will not end there. You will have to continually monitor the performance and returns via your email marketing software to see whether times have changed. If so you should backtrack a bit or, of course, push a bit more.