Building a mailing list of opt-in subscribers is easy when you first launch your campaign. You call it out on your site and social channels, tell clients in person when you talk to them over the phone or when they’re passing through your cash register, set up a subscription form on your site and even your Facebook page and, before you know it, you have a mailing list.
Great. But…
Most email marketers will find once the initial enthusiasm and novelty around their campaign wears off the number of new subscribers slows down. It makes perfect sense as you’ve already signed up all the most likely prospects – your existing valued clients.
I guess that more than a quarter of all the emails you receive in your inbox are email marketing emails that you’ve subscribed to; that number is growing annually. Subscribers simply receive too many emails from various sources and no longer have the time to read them all, which often leads to a mailbox spring clean, and unsubscribes.
All in all, between the growing email volume users are faced with daily, the choice of newsletters they have to subscribe to as well as the fact that you’ve already signed up the easy targets; it becomes increasingly difficult to get new subscribers to opt in to your mailing list. Even when you do get new subscribers, lists tend to remain stable as existing subscribers unsubscribe. This could be for various reasons – they no longer have a need for your product or service or your newsletters aren’t grabbing their attention.
So I could give you tips on how to grow your mailing list… but getting new subscribers really is futile if you don’t manage to keep your existing readers interested.
Ultimately, the only way to keep subscribers on your list is by providing them with relevant, value-laden content. (You’ll hear this advice from any email marketing source until you’re ready to put your fingers in your ears, but it’s simply the way the email marketing industry has developed.)
You want to boost the level of interaction your subscribers have with your email newsletters. Not only is this becoming more important given new trends among ISPs, but it shows that your email marketing efforts are making an impact. Increased engagement (through opening, reading, clicking through to your site or sharing your newsletters) mean that you’re building a greater brand awareness, getting more email-initiated sales or growing your email marketing reach. The quality of your mailing list (read: engaged, interested and interactive subscribers) means much more than the size of it.
Curb unsubscribes – hook them back in.
Try a few tricks with your content and subject line. It could be that you simply need a fresh perspective or tone in your copy. Or throw in a special offer, like a promotion, discount, webinar, or special report – something that differentiates this email from your previous sends. Of course this won’t work on a regular basis, but it might be enough to refresh interest in your campaign.
I don’t think people generally unsubscribe entirely out of the blue. I always give a sender the benefit of the doubt – I keep hoping that they’ll impress or tempt my interest with their next mailer… or the one after that. Many of us are simply afraid of missing out: “What if they send out some truly ground-breaking industry research the day after I unsubscribed? Wouldn’t that just be typical…”
It takes some time for a subscriber to click on an unsubscribe link, which means you have time to change their minds, but only if you pick up on the fact that they’ve lost interest.
Monitor your send reports and take note of inactivity on your list. This can be lower open or click-through rates, or even lower social share statistics (if you usually get quite a lot of these). Take note of a lack of activity, measure it against previous sends and see if it improves over your next few sends. If not, it’s time to tweak your campaign.
Another good way of tempting inactive subscribers is to split your sends. Send your email to the list of subscribers who interact with your emails regularly, then send a second version to those who never open your emails. You then have nothing to risk with the second send, so test an array of tricks (subject lines, content, layout) and see if you can’t tempt a reaction out of them. If nothing else it’s an interesting experiment…
Sometimes, you’ve gotta let it go.
If you’re finding that certain subscribers have shown no engagement with your newsletters over an extended period of time, it might be best to shrink your list. Send out a polite request asking those subscribers to update their preferences, of course, with the unsubscribe link displayed in your footer. It could be that some of those email addresses simply aren’t used anymore, in which case you’ll have to remove them yourself.
Where email marketers used to boast “mine’s bigger than yours” when comparing mailing lists with their competitors, it’s become evident that this is no longer necessarily a good thing. A smaller list of engaged subscribers is more likely to generate sales, conversions or lifelong customers than a large list of uninterested parties.
Image: Francesco Marino
