Is your email marketing list engaged?
This is question you need to ask yourself and take a good hard look at what you’ve got going on with your list. When you are working with larger lists, or or a variety of groups / recipients who opted in from different places, entire portions of your email subscribers can be neglected, which defeats the whole purpose of having a list in the first place.
You’ve got to pay a lot of attention to what your sending out and determine if what you’re sending appeals or speaks to your audience. If it does not, it could have a huge negative impact not only on a decrease or total void of opens but also having people unsubscribing, which is a bad thing! You went to a lot of work to get them on your list in the first place.
Here’s a list of ideas that can help improve your list engagement right from the outset, including one final tip we believe is the best and most effective move you can make to get the most out of every email sent.
1. Compelling Welcome Message
If someone sent you the first email in your autoresponder campaign – how would you react to it now?? Your first message if your first opportunity to interact direct with your new subscriber. It should be an amazing part of your email marketing and should really engage further with your new subscriber – after all, this is the moment they are interested, don’t miss out on connecting fully!
This interaction will set the tone of your conversation with your subscriber. Make sure it’s setting the right tone!
2. Optimize Your Email Marketing Efforts with Testing
Do you ever go back and test to see if your campaigns are working? Hoping for good results and just plugging away without really optimizing your campaigns might have worked once upon a time when getting an email was a unique things for folks. Now however, with people getting hundreds of emails you need to make sure what you’re doing stands out and speaks directly to your audience. So one thing you can do right away is make sure you create specific lists for specific people to opt into – segment your list.
Perform tests with 5-10% of your list at a time. Try different email formats, different subject lines, different call to action, different images, linking to different places. The open and click rates on the messages – this is data that will help you figure out exactly what your doing right and also what you’re doing that is not effective. Everything you learn from this will transfer over to invaluable data in all of your marketing efforts.
So TEST!! TEST!!! TEST!!!
3. Get Rid of Unresponsive Placeholders on your Email Marketing List
So what if you determine that your email marketing lists doesn’t engage, doesn’t read adn don’t even bother opening let alone clicking your links in your emails? A few things you can do is adjust the frequency that you are sending out emails. There’s something to be said about “email overload,” and if people see less of you, they may view the content they do receive as more exclusive.
So why pay for a list full of subscriber who don’t engage and interact? More importantly, seeing that big subscriber number may give you a false sense of accomplishment. Having a big list is good, but if they are not reading, opening or clicking, then the numbers aren’t what I call “real” and knowing a real number of people who actively wish to read your content is an excellent way to judge your marketing efforts.
So what’s an easy way to do this?? What I do is create a blog page with a new “newsletter” opt-in form. Then I can send a few emails out to your list telling them that you are updating your service or lists or whatever and ask them to “resubscribe” at this link to continue receiving your emails. Now….. will you lose a lot of people. YES if you stop using the old list completely, but the people you will get on your new list are very active and that’s a good thing.
You can also, just go through and delete people individually who haven’t opened anything in quite a while – six or seven months or more. If you have a smaller list this is a good option as well.
While you ideally never want to close the door on a potential customer relationship, a quick look at a customer’s engagement metrics (and purchase history) could help you weed out the chaff, allowing you to focus on the recipients that are benefiting your bottom line.
If nothing else, a little “list-scaping” will help your open rates and give you more accurate data to build upon.
4. Capture an Attitude
With so many emails arriving in people’s inboxes each day, you need to work harder to stand out from the crowd. Nothing comes for free, and potential subscribers want something in exchange for their email address. It’s up to you to give it to them in a reliable and trustworthy fashion.
Maybe you pride yourself on your motivational approach to writing copy, or maybe you have some excellent designers who can give your mails an image-heavy feel. If you can pull off humor, use it to your advantage. Make someone laugh or smile and you’ve captured his or her attention.
And perhaps the most important tip we can share:
5. Segment Your Lists
Breaking lists into groups of similar recipients is one of the best ways to improve engagement.
Specialized communication based on people’s prior purchases, engagement levels, interests, geographic location, or virtually any other category can be an ingenious method of proactive marketing.
Knowing they are acknowledged for a specific reason increases people’s tendency to open, click through, and take action on the emails they receive.
Takeaway
Take the time to adjust and perfect email campaigns (based on test data, of course) and you’ll come to find how valuable the effort can be. Don’t assume a large list is going to automatically get you what you want. If you take the right steps, you’ll not only watch your lists grow, but you’ll be confident they are doing their job, and doing it well.
