How to keep your subscribers Happy and Engaged

How to keep your subscribers Happy and Engaged

Email marketing is still an effective way to build a loyal customer base. It is, however, getting more difficult all the time. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, there is more competition now than ever before. People are also becoming less tolerant of promotional emails. Remember, even Gmail recently introduced tabs, and group promotional emails into a specific tab?

That’s why it’s essential for mailing list owners to keep their subscribers happy. You must first gain their trust enough so that they give you their email addresses. Then you have to keep them engaged so that they remain subscribers and, hopefully, respond to some of your offers.

Let’s look at some of the best ways to ensure that your email subscribers appreciate your emails and don’t consider them a nuisance!

• Attracting the Right Subscribers

  In order to develop a good relationship with your subscribers, it’s necessary to attract the right type of people to your list. Some email marketers make the mistake of trying so hard to build a huge list that they neglect to consider the quality of their subscribers.

  You should give plenty of thought to the type of offer you present in order to attract subscribers in the first place. It’s fine to give something away, such as a free course or e-book. Make sure, however, that it’s well targeted towards the type of audience that’s right for you.

  If your goal is to sell people a high end marketing course that costs $2,000, giving away an e-book on “How to Make Money With No Investment” is probably not going to get you the best prospects. If you start pitching these people for expensive courses, they will probably feel that you misled them.

  You also have to make sure that your original offer is consistent with what you plan to send them long term. A big part of keeping your subscribers happy is building a list that really wants what you are sending out. Keep this in mind when you design landing pages or ads which you intend to use to lure new subscribers.

• Email Regularly But Not Too Often

  One challenge of email marketing is knowing how often to email your list. If you only send out emails occasionally, you won’t be able to build a relationship with your list. People may even forget who you are if they only receive messages from you rarely.

  On the other hand, if you bombard your subscribers with messages several times per day, they will quickly grow tired of this. You will probably find that many people unsubscribe from your list.

  What is the ideal schedule to follow for sending out emails? There’s no one formula, but you have to strike a balance and find the right schedule. Some successful email marketers send out messages every single day.

  More than once per day, however, is usually too much – unless you have a special reason for it. For example, someone promoting a major launch may send out lots of messages when the launch date gets close.

  Once per week is the minimum you should email your list. Several times per week is fine as well.

• Don’t Over Promote

  Another mistake that some internet marketers make is that they promote too many offers to their subscribers. There should be a balance between value and advertising in any email you sent. This is especially true if you call your messages a newsletter. A newsletter is supposed to deliver real information, not simply pitch offers!

  If you deliver valuable content to your subscribers, you can also “sneak” in offers along with the rest of the message. For example, after a helpful article on a website building topic you can recommend a web hosting package that is really great at a good discount. As long as you truly believe in the web hosting company and their services, there’s nothing wrong with doing this.

  What you should avoid is focusing entirely on selling to your subscribers. Another problem that occurs in popular niches such as online marketing is that many website owners promote the very same products. This often causes a backlash among subscribers, who don’t like to see the same offers multiple times a day!

Some tips to keep your readers engaged

No matter what the goal of your newsletter or email messages, aim to engage your readers in a way that keeps them interested. You can do this in a variety of ways, such as the following:

• Link to interesting videos, images or infographics. Of course, you could create an interesting infographic of your own, just like my Thunder Mailer Infographic! What do you think of this infographic which my designer did?
• Seek out information in your niche that isn’t widely known or discussed.
• Tell stories or anecdotes related to your main topic about your own experiences or things that have happened to well known people. Everyone responds to stories.
• Consider segmenting your subscriber list. This means dividing it up into groups based on interests or demographics. That way you can focus on the specific interests of each group and not have your messages too general.
• Run polls or surveys to find out what your readers want. Encourage feedback by asking them questions.

Your subscribers must come first

Remember that your subscribers will only help you succeed if you deliver something of value to them. They are not interested primarily in buying something from you. They signed up for your list to learn something or to get some type of benefit. You have to make sure you keep up your end of the bargain.

Email marketing is only going to get more competitive and challenging in the coming years. The marketers who flourish will be the ones who know how to keep their readers engaged. There are many ways to this, and we’ve discussed some of them in this article. It all starts with targeting your audience in the right manner so that people don’t come to your list with the wrong expectations.

Think about the emails that you receive and how you react to them. Consider which lists you unsubscribed from and which ones you have stayed on for a long time. If you put yourself in the place of your subscribers, you can better understand what it takes to keep them content.