Don't neglect your unsubscribing process
Getting your email unsubscribe process right is critical to your email marketing success. But, why? Surely concentrating your efforts on subscribers who have decided that they want to leave your list is time wasted. Wouldn't you be better off focusing your efforts on improving emails to those just entering the funnel, rather than those electing to drop out of it?
We've been taking a look at best practices for managing email unsubscribes in a new research report on the State of Email Unsubscribing 2016 which we have published with Alchemy Worx. It reports on how retailers are managing unsubscribes, and then goes on to recommend best practice as well as mistakes to avoid.
There are a number of reasons why you need to get your unsubscribe process right, and it's not just about winning back customers. First of all consider these key points:
Unsubscribing isn't a failure or even a permanent state for your…
15 techniques to grow your email subscribers
It's often easy to neglect your email list when there's a push to grow fans and followers on the social networks. But it's worth working on boosting email subscriptions too since email subscribers often have a strong level of trust in your content and brand. It's also easier to target them more easily with relevant offers based on their preferences and past behaviour. It’s often your email subscribers who convert to sale at a much higher rate than other sources of web traffic; they are most likely a significant segment of your buyers.
It makes sense to focus on getting sign-ups to an email list. "Traffic" is less useful unless you're confident of the source and that you can convert it, to something. Email traffic is a strong source of warm traffic.
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Examples showing how to use quizzes to boost your email sign ups
If you've worked in marketing for more than ten minutes, you know that generating fresh leads is the backbone of everything that happens in the marketing world. In this article I'm going to look at how quizzes, those viral, shareable, pieces of content, can be turned into lead generation machines that feed the top of your sales funnel.
To better understand how quizzes can build your email list, we are going to follow the process of three companies whose quizzes combined to bring in 5,570 new email leads. We'll look at the exact method each marketer used to formulate these quizzes and we'll walk away with actionable ways you can create your own quizzes for lead generation.
Step 1. What to make a quiz about
Before you do anything, you need a subject to create your quiz on. To learn more on…
Ideas to turn Email Unsubscribes into Email 'Opt-Ins'
EmailMonks have another useful infographic here exploring creative ways renowned brands are including unsubscribes in their emails and retaining their lists. In their words 'at a point, where our readers have decided to opt-out, the most we can do, is take a chance by giving them a reason to stay! The company’s unsubscribe landing page should clearly state this ‘reason to stay’!
Their Infographic provides best practices, how to avoid known pitfalls and creative ways of managing this. Do you have a one click unsubscribe to save time or a preference centre. Take a look at how companies including Abercombie & Fitch and KissMetrics have become smarter at converting 'Opt-outs' to 'Opt-ins'.
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Plus a clever Facebook cover image trick
With ever lowering Facebook reach, fan acquisition on Facebook is increasingly less of a desirable goal. Yet I do believe that the platform still has a major role to play for many brands, not least because of the ubiquity of the platform, but also for its simply awesome targeting potential.
Savvy brands are using the platform to acquire new potential customers, but not necessarily as fans, instead they are using Facebook's wealth of advertising opportunities to data capture email addresses for their own databases.
Page admins have moaned long and hard about decreasing reach - how hard it is to reach fans which many have paid to acquire. With the end of like gating and further algorithm changes afoot in January (Facebook will drastically reduce the reach of Pages that have a tendency to post promotional content with limited "context"), it is most certainly time to…
Three steps to organic list growth
Often marketers will want to email as many people as possible, as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible. This is a common mindset which can end in marketers purchasing or renting an email list.
If you are looking either for immediate or long term results, buying a list is not the answer. Instead follow our three steps to organic list growth to build your database without damaging your email list health.
Step 1. Optimise your web sign up
The first step in building an organic email list is optimising your web sign up. This may seem obvious; however web sign up can be easy to get wrong, so make sure you have this basic step perfected to avoid any negative knock on effects further down the line.
Optimise your form
Begin by creating a solid form which will encourage users to hand over their information instead of leaving your site.
Make…
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June 9, 2014
Unsubscribing does not have to be forever
Offering customers the option to unsubscribe without gathering any detailed information as to why the customer wants to unsubscribe is all too commonplace and wasteful. Some brands will go a step further by providing a tick list of reasons e.g. 'I receive too many emails from you', ' I receive them too frequently' etc. It almost feels like the email marketer has thrown in the towel by not taking things a step further as neither of these methods provides the brand with an opportunity to maintain a relationship.
Here is a different approach I have seen more recently which seems more enlightened.
Campaign Example for a Holiday brand
Work on the timing
Some brands have started to ask if the customer would like to receive emails again at a particular time e.g. in a year’s time or better still at a…
A case study of boosting offline email signups 3.3x with SMS
Increasing the number of customer touch points used to ask for an email address is a good start to accelerating email list growth.
However, the way in which the email address is requested makes a big difference to how fast your list grows. Its not just the copy and incentive, as are commonly considered, but the process too and for offline data collection the response channel.
In this case providing customers the ability to subscribe by sending their email address using SMS delivered 3.3x more email addresses than simply advertising a web signup link.
Remarkable given that the vast majority of brands simply give a URL in offline advertising, posters and other media.
Zettasphere worked with Deal Monster to put to the test the signup method. Deal Monster are part of the Johnson press group, so it made sense for Deal Monster…
Do you dare ask your mailing list if they want to unsubscribe?
In this post, I'll veer away from my usual advice and updates on Facebook, although Facebook does feature. This is the story of what some might think is pretty much the anathema of a good marketer... I proactively tried to reduce the size of my mailing list.
Why? Well a number of reasons, the idea was initially driven by the fact that we were about to go over a monthly price threshold in our email provider's pricing options. At the same time the list felt like it was getting a bit dated with open rates languishing and some names having been with us for up to a decade. We'd recently done a competition which rewarded people for referring "friends". It was clear from a look through some of these email addresses that they were in fact second or third emails…
12 Smart ways to capture customer data
Since email marketing is one of the most influential touch points in the online path to purchase, you’ll want to capture as many interested contacts as you can. Ideally you will also enrich these with profile data in order to develop a high segmentation methodology to enable you to target. It is not easy to make the most of the options to capture emails, but it's worthwhile reviewing all the touchpoints. Almost every interaction that your customers have online with any organisation - attempts to capture data, so you need to cut through that noise.
So let's break it down, how do you improve email capture and progressive profiling? This is best done in two ways:
1. Firstly, exchanging value in return for the data, such as more relevant content and products or offers exclusive to subscribers.2. Secondly, by capturing bits of data from multiple channels over…
