Subscriber Engagement: What Matters?
by Kelly Rusk
Printed with permission from "What Other Marketers are Thinking" in Chapter 4 of Email Marketing by the Numbers.

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So you got people to opt-in to receive your emails. Now you can go ahead and send them whatever you want, whenever you want and they will just love you forever, right?

As ridiculous as that sounds, the truth is email marketers often worry more about growing their database than keeping existing subscribers engaged. Like any kind of business, it’s more cost-effective and valuable to keep existing subscribers, rather than find new ones.

Email marketing is all about relationships, and like any relationship, it takes work to keep your subscribers happy. In order to develop your email subscriber relationship, it’s important to know who your subscribers are and what type of information they want to receive from you.

While there can be hundreds of methods, facts, and opinions about how to keep subscribers engaged, it really all comes down to testing with your own list. After all, I think you know your own subscribers better than I do!

But what do you test? The joy (and pain?) of email is there are so many variables. The possibilities are endless and I’ve included what I believe to be the big ones:

Determine Email Frequency

Sending emails too often might annoy your subscribers and cause many to unsubscribe. While there is no rule of thumb for email frequency, unless you are sending very relevant information, more than once a week may be too much. If you send too infrequently, however, subscribers may forget about you and lose interest. Once a month is usually a good fit, but again it depends on who you are talking to and the nature of your relationship.

Develop a Mouth-Watering Content Recipe

Are you sending a good mix of timely, relevant, and meaningful content to keep your subscribers engaged? Like perfecting a cooking recipe, you may need to experiment before getting it right. Carefully examine your click-through results and make note of what works and what doesn’t.

Your content recipe will depend on what your business offers, your relationship to subscribers, and what resources you have, but some suggestions are:

Don’t forget segmentation

Probably the most effective way to keep subscribers engaged is segmentation. Segmentation can be as simple as splitting your list by preferred email format (HTML or text) or as complex as segmenting by geographic location, interests, purchasing behavior, gender, click-through habits and more.

The easiest way to start a segmentation strategy is with your opt-in signup form. It’s important to carefully choose which subscriber details to ask for.  You don’t want to ask for too much as it may defer some from signing up – but you want enough information so that you can start segmenting effectively from the start.

Segmentation should be an on-going strategy that is reviewed and revised as your subscriber relationships grow. After you’ve split your lists, you need to determine the best way to speak to each group. Will you use different graphics? If you’re segmenting by geographic location, maybe you will use a different image that represents where each segment lives. The possibilities are endless.

Set the tone with the right welcome message

Like the crucial first date, your welcome message sets the tone for the subscriber relationship. Studies show that the welcome message, the first message to your subscriber, has the highest open rate of all – this is a well read message so make the most of it! First, and obviously, you want to make your new subscriber feel comfortable and welcome. It’s a good idea to reiterate what they’re getting into (what type of content you’ll be sending and how often) and cover some housekeeping items (asking to be added to their safe sender/address book, linking to your privacy policy, and instructions about unsubscribing in future mailings). Also you may want to offer a little bonus for signing up – a free download, a complimentary white paper, an entry into a contest, or whatever may be valuable to your audience.

That being said, it’s very important to keep the welcome message short and sweet. Leave them wanting more!

Test, measure, refine. REPEAT!

Subscribers’ interests change over time, so be prepared to change your strategy. Review your strategy once a year to ensure your emails are maximizing their potential. If they aren’t, it’s time to start testing something else and making refinements to keep your e-marketing program on track!

Think small for big results

Think quality not quantity. Forget about getting millions of barely interested people on one big list, rather, focus on getting all your subscribers anticipating your every email. With our fixation on ROI and the bottom line, it’s hard to step back and think quality over quantity, but consider this – is it better to have 100 subscribers engaged in every email, or 10,000 subscribers deleting it regularly? Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but having qualified, interested, and engaged subscribers will definitely do more for your business than being able to brag about your huge database. And if your list is big, think about how you can slice and dice it. That’s when you’ll see the magic of segmentation in email marketing begin.

Show a little respect!

Ask anyone how life is these days and you’ll probably hear “busy!” Also, think of all the email you receive, do you read each one? Be respectful to your subscribers’ time, keep your emails short and to the point. That doesn’t mean you have to throw away content for the sake of brevity, just provide the important stuff in the email and link to additional information. Think scanability – your email should look easy to digest at first glance. Keep sentences and paragraphs short, leave lots of white space and add graphics to support your story.

And on that note, I think I’ve said enough. Email marketing is a powerful tool and, when used strategically, can provide amazing results. I see it everyday! I’m Kelly, and I’m an email-aholic.