How much of your database should be nurtured?

[Justin_Chor]

Hello Community! We're currently in the process of rebuilding our general email nurtures from scratch and are playing around with segment sizes and how broad or targeted we want to go with our audience. There doesn't seem to be a lot of info out there in terms of a general guideline on how much (what percentage) of your database should be nurtured. Curious to hear anyone's thoughts on nurture volume and any potential concerns (ie. deliverability/domain reputation) that might result from batching too many contacts into an engagement program at once. Thanks!

[Amanda_Reilly3 · Accepted solution]

Hi Justin! 

There are a lot of variables to consider here but my main recommendations would be making sure the content is relevant to the segment you're creating and not base it on percentages. 

Things to consider: 

• Are you scoring your audience based on interactions with your brand? Can you determine who is active and who is not and provide content specific to these findings? 
• How many records in your database are customers and do you have content specific to those customers that is helpful for using your product or for upsell/cross sell purposes? 
• How many records in your database are actively in communication with the sales team? This may warrant a conversation with the sales operations or sales teams to ensure a cohesive story is presented to these individuals and don't compete for attention/tell different stories. 
• Do you frequently have 50+ people from a single company in your instance?
• What percentage of your database is marketable? (this percentage I can advise on, obviously the higher the better, and above 75% is great)

Concerns with over emailing would include: 

• If sent to too many people at the same company you risk violating their ESP's rules on spam (I've seen multiple companies entirely block senders for this purpose
• If you're emailing to people who historically have not interacted with your company, or have not in a long time, then you do risk reducing your sender reputation 
• If the health of your database isn't great and you have several old records who haven't been emailed in a while, you do risk being blocklisted by hitting a spam trap. 

I would start small - be super specific in your personas (job title, location, industry, etc.), and possibly start with an activity filter - for example, only records who have interacted meaningfully with your company in the last 6 months. 

From there you can see how the audience/content performs and begin adding more "risky" segments (people you know less about/have less activity) or building more content for a different segmentation. 

Hope that helps!