Fighting Email Fatigue

9 Tips to engage your email subscribers

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Our commentary: This 12 page whitepaper download from Selligent (registration required) advises brands on how to tackle the ongoing challenge of the best way to engage customers with email marketing.

Marketing implications: I think these guidelines are the most useful part of the report, so I'm sharing them here with my commentary.

• 1. Offer a choice of communications. This is a preference centre to enable customers to receive the type of emails they want.
• 2. Respect permission. Double opt-in is suggested. I don't agree with this in all markets, all cases. It's essential if you're selling a list, but in a customer relationship which starts with an on-site enewsletter signup or during the checkout I think it's unecessary because the relationship is already developed.
• 3. Analyse, automate, segment and target. I like this call to action! But these are each individually major challenges to refine your email marketing. I think the most important takeaway here is to review response pre and post-click by segments, then you can see which communications are working for you and your audience and adjust accordingly.
• 4. Survey. The main message here is that the response statistics will only tell you so much about the sentiment, opinion on the email. So you need to survey your subscribers regularly to get feedback here.
• 5. Test and improve. Use AB testing of subject lines, offers and headlines or multivariate testing of creative and offers if you have a large list.
• 6. Invest in content. Amen! Ultimately, it's the quality of your content that engages, so you need a strategy to make sure your content is king.
• 7. Improve list quality. Make sure your systems is removing hard bounces after 2 or 3 email sends and try to reengage offline if it's a valuable customer, which is often the case in B2B Email marketing.
• 8. Coordinate your campaigns. Ensure integration occurs to boost response.
• 9. Involve your recipients. Similar to point 4, emphasising the importance of surveys. This should also cover the integration with social media to help build a following within Facebook or Twitter.

Recommended link: Download whitepaper