Maintaining an Engaged Email Marketing List

Today’s customers expect more. They want more personalization, more relevant content, and more engagement. They are savvier than ever before and are usually inundated with countless other brands vying for their attention and business. While email marketing has a good track record of driving traffic and sales, it takes very little for customers to become unengaged with marketing communications when those messages don’t tick off all the boxes.

For marketers, email is an effective channel to reach customers that they will continue to use. In a recent survey by Ascend2, 74% of respondents (marketers) said that they expect to increase the volume of email campaigns either significantly or moderately in the next year. The same respondents indicated that the biggest challenge (45%) to making their email marketing efforts effective is maintaining subscribers’ engagement.

So, how can we keep our subscribers interested in what we have to say? Here are some strategies:

Start with the Right Data

Data is the most crucial tool for marketers, and when it’s good, it’s golden. The challenge with collecting information is ensuring that it’s clean, complete, and relevant. When you collect the right data upfront with gated content and sign-up forms, your email campaigns will be more effective, and your customers will be more engaged. Try to limit the amount of information you ask for because when there are too many fields, form fills decrease.

Clean Your List Regularly

Cleansing your customer list of duplicate or invalid email addresses will increase your overall engagement rates and allow you to build more significant relationships with your subscribers. Removing unengaged customers from your email database creates a more targeted list of contacts who are truly interested in your products and services. As a result, you can create more targeted and relevant content that engages their interests and needs.

Segment Your List

Creating separate subscriber lists for different categories based on subscribers’ interests allows you to be extremely targeted with email content. Segmentation can be a powerful tool in improving engagement. The four main types of segmentation are demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral, but you may choose to segment your subscribers differently depending on the products and services you’re selling. When you use segmentation, you can create email content that is more valuable and significant to recipients.

Create Strategic Gated Content

Gated content requires viewers to fill out a form, subscribe, or make a purchase before gaining access to reading it. Using gated content ensures that readers are genuinely interested in reading what you have to say and allows you to get to know them better.

Use Opt-Ins and Sign-Up Forms

For email marketing to be successful, you need a list of subscribers who want to be on your list. Using opt-ins and sign-up forms ensures that they are. You are getting their permission to contact them. If they are not really interested, they won’t complete the form.

Provide Valuable Content

Once you have a clean list of subscribers who are actually interested in your products, send them content that is valuable to them. It has to be more than promotional content; it must be useful and relevant to them and their needs. Give them content that encourages them to stay engaged.

Final Thoughts

Marketing is often about numbers. However, it’s far more critical to have an email list with fewer truly engaged customers than a long list of people who aren’t clicking to open your emails. Managing your email marketing list with the strategies above will help ensure you’re reaching people who want to learn about your products and hear what you have to say. And with a more engaged community, you will have higher conversion rates, which means higher customer satisfaction and increased revenue.