Hello everyone, this is part 3 of our Email Marketing Best Practices, where we will be looking at how to engage and retain your subscriber list. If you’ve missed one of the previous parts, you can still go back and read them, Part 1: Avoid becoming spam and Part 2: Prepare for landing, don’t worry, we will wait for you….

Ok, now that we are all at the same point, let’s get started.

For all the benefits that email marketing can bring to you and your business, there will also challenges to overcome, it can be one of the most cost effective marketing channels if you use it the right way. One of the biggest challenges you will need to overcome is engaging your subscribers and keeping them interested, and on your subscriber list.

You will have put a lot of effort into building up your list of subscribers and getting as few unsubscribes as possible should be a top priority. Using email is a fantastic way to get yourself in front of your subscribers, but with the huge amount of spam and other factors, outside of your control, it will take more than an attractive offer to keep your subscribers engaged. Let’s take a look at some useful techniques you can use to keep them on that list!

Use drip marketing campaigns

Drip marketing campaigns are a set of pre-created emails that are scheduled to send out when triggered by certain actions (remember how talked about the welcome message in Part 1? That would be the one of these). There are a number of different triggers you can set up, like sending out a series of emails once someone has signed up to your newsletter, shopping cart abandonment emails, to remind the person that they didn’t finish the checkout process, prompting them to come back and finish the order, you can even set up a birthday incentive campaign. So remember you need to;

1. Set up email campaigns on predefined triggers.
2. Engage your subscribers through relevant emails and offers.
3. Qualify leads and nurture them through the sales cycle.

Target Based on Engagement Level

One of the important factors you will need to find out is which subscribers are engaged by what emails, when you know who is responding to your emails, from open rates, click-throughs etc. it becomes a much simpler task to see who is engaging with that email campaign, and who isn’t.

1. Segment you subscriber lists by the actions they take (opens, clicks, purchases etc.)
2. Use re-engagement emails to remind subscribers that didn’t responded to your message after a certain amount of time.
3. Remove subscribers who you aren’t able to engage, there is no point using your time effort and money on a fruitless cause.

Test and Respond Accordingly

Something that is important in all aspects of marketing is testing, it will give you a better insight to what is and isn’t working, allowing you to tailor your email campaigns to be as effective as possible.

1. Test different subject lines, content, layout images etc. to see what is the most effective.
2. From your testing, you will be able to create a more engaging email campaign to send out.
3. Increase your engagement levels, response rates and ROI.

You will always want to build up and increase your contact list, and grow your business, but you need to remember the most valuable subscribers are the ones you already have, who have shown they are engaged and want to read and respond to your email campaigns, retaining them will take time and effort, but your business will benefit all the more with their continued loyalty and support.

Although you are always working to build your contact list for the sake of growing business, the most valuable subscribers are the ones you already have, being able to keep them may take some hard work, but it is all worth it when they reward your business with their continued loyalty support rates.

Using Social with Email Marketing

Email marketing go together like bread and butter, they compliment each other perfectly and with the importance of social media for businesses it is a good idea to use the two together, doing so can give you a greater reach and increase awareness of you. Used correctly, combining these areas of marketing can be very powerful, some of the techniques you can use are;

Prompt signups from social pages

If they are connected to your social channels, they likely are interested in what you are saying and want to hear from you, why not let get that straight to their inbox? Either include a form on you social pages, or provide a link where they can subscriber to your email list.

Tweet Your Email Client

If you have something really important or interesting to share with your fans, you can use Twitter to send out a tweet, with the web version if the email, extending your reach beyond the confines of the inbox and subscriber list.

Include social buttons

You can include social buttons in your emails (normally at the footer or in the header), which allow subscribers to connect with you on social networks. You can also add social sharing buttons and give your readers to share your content (very powerful if you have exclusive or must see content), allowing your message to go out beyond the email.

We hoped you enjoyed third part of our Email marketing best practices, and that you will go away with some fresh ideas on how to engage and retain your email lists (why not tweet to use about it). Next week, we will be the last part in the email series, where we will talk about the importance of optimising your emails for mobile, see you then.

If in the meantime you feel like your email campaigns aren’t performing as well as you think they should, then drop us a message and we would be happy to help.