Email marketing can be a very effective way to hold onto your audience by sending relevant newsletters and promotions. The worst case scenario would be for your subscribers to consider your emails spam or junk mail. The internet is so full of clutter that users are becoming more and more experienced at sorting through the junk, and they will immediately send “spam” to the trash bin accordingly. It is important for subscribers to see your emails as valuable messages that stand out in their overflowing inboxes.
MarketingSherpa did a study which asked internet users the reasons why they have unsubscribed or stopped reading emails from one or more businesses in the last year. The results of this study have been posted as a helpful chart which can be accessed here.
The main reason is clear: people unsubscribe from email lists if they believe the emails are not relevant to them. The obvious message from this survey is that it is incredibly important to send relevant emails to your subscribers as often as possible to keep them interested.
The best way to accomplish this is organize your list so that you can better target different groups of customers with promotions and messages specific to their wants and needs. Here are some good strategies for achieving this:
- Reward your regular and best customers with special discounts or bonus offers for their next purchase to keep them coming back for more.
- If customers haven’t bought from you in awhile, or have never bought from you, attract them with a limited time offer and build your relationship by providing valuable, free information.
- For international customers, hold specials based on their holidays for them.
- Gather as much information as possible on your customers. Their gender, age, hobbies, and interests are all great ways to organize and target your email messages to make them more relevant to your subscribers.
The above are merely general suggestions and obviously may not apply to some of you. However, 2 points found within the above suggestions are always relevant: provide valuable content and get to know your readers. If you can understand what your readers want and can provide it for them, then you are on the right track to keeping their attention focused on you.
Recommended Email Marketing Software
I am just now starting to use AWeber, an affordable email marketing software which can help you set up email lists and communicate with your readers/subscribers. In the coming weeks I will be using it more heavily and will try to provide guidance and tips on how to use AWeber effectively to build and maintain an email audience.
