Tip #3: Four ways of Keeping Email Marketing Solutions Contacts Active
The success of your email marketing is dependent on how good your list of contacts is. Email marketing industry research has revealed that three months after signing on to your mailing list your contacts begin to disappear off of your radar. This reduction in contacts’ interest should be anticipated with any contact list, however there are a few methods to ensure that this downsizing is kept to a minimum, subsequently making sure that the size of your high quality contacts is far larger. The following will provide you with four useful tactics that will assist your email marketing efforts.
“Important Client” Incentives:
Whenever you have something to sell to a customer, employing special promotions will keep your contacts’ attention on your newsletters and services. Giving a discount to your contacts that have not responded by opening emails in recent months can bring them back to the active column. Plus, sending offers to recently unresponsive contacts needs to provide them the chance to update their contact preferences etc. Gathering more data on what they are looking for as a customer and getting more current information will help you know your customer’s needs better.
Send Out a Questionnaire:
The best way to discover why a customer hasn’t been opening your emails is to ask them. Using email marketing software you can create a survey (that is quick and easy to fill out) so that in-actives can provide you with feedback. This is valuable information on things to avoid, but more importantly will tell you EXACTLY what particular users need from you so that you maintain them as active contacts. The survey will have questions relevant to your services, but be sure to also include things like a “preferred kind of message” section, or “best time to contact by email” section and of course a “comments and suggestions” section.
Go Over Your Contacts with a Fine Tooth Comb:
Often times you’ll notice that there are chunks of subscribers not responding to your emails that all have similarities. Through these similarities you might be able to determine how to get through to those groups. You might find there is a section of your subscribers that are all in a particular demographic that you haven’t been targeting in your email marketing software campaigns: young men, older women, single parents, or people in a different time zone, etc. By taking a closer look at your contacts you might get a lightning bolt idea as to why they have not previously responded and can easily remedy it so that your email marketing software yields even better results.
Test Your Email Marketing Tactics:
There is no harm in spending a little time testing-out different ways of sending to determine if it can attract a few more in-actives to the “good side”.
If you’ve always sent out email on the same day or time of day, try a few varied distribution times; see if it produces a different response. You can also change how often you’re sending your emails. If you’re accustomed to sending once a month, you may want to try sending twice a month, or once every two months.
Additionally you can modify the content of your emails to discover more about how your campaign’s effect your contacts. After you’ve taken a closer look at your contacts you may have discovered a commonality between them that requires you to change the content of the email to match the needs of those subscribers. Another way to experiment is to send a campaign in a different format. If you normally send out all text emails, then send out a more dynamic campaign; or vice-versa.
A major component is your subject line. Often all that is required of you is to change the subject line to bring back your inactive contacts. An inactive subscriber might have been reluctant to open your emails because your subject line is always the same or very similar to all the other messages sent. Your in active subscriber is likely making the assumption that if the subject line doesn’t change, neither does the content of the email marketing campaign.
Testing out different methods of sending out campaigns will activate the pulses on some of your more zombie-like subscribers, but will also give you valuable information on what their wants and needs are.
Experienced email marketers put the time in to work on their contact list. Now is your opportunity to ensure that you are getting the most out of your email marketing campaigns by putting in that added elbow grease so that your subscribers are aware of and listening to your messages.
Rudy Barell is a Senior Development Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing used by businesses around the globe. Create eye-catching emails and track your success with detailed reports for your email marketing solutionsTry it free!
Tags: contact list management, Email, email marketing, email marketing software, Internet Marketing, list maintenance, list management, list manager, marketing, online marketing, subscriber management