04-26-2007

How to Save Your Subscribers

On a forum I visit, it seems every week someone is complaining about receiving “X” emails a week from marketers. Then most of the replies fall into one or two categories:

A. Stop whining and click the unsubscribe link.
B: I agree! Once a week is enough.

What some people don’t realise about email marketing is that the more emails you send, the more money you make. Some argue that the retention rate would be higher with less emails and would lead to more profits. While this might be true for some lists, as a whole it’s not. Testing has proved that no matter how often you send emails, about the same number of people will opt-out and you will get the same amount of sales on a per email basis.

Some people have even said if you don’t send email often enough, your spam complaints will increase and your profits will decline over time. They say it’s because you aren’t recognized. While I haven’t read any reports on this or tested it myself, it does make sense.

So what can you do? How can you email on a frequent (even daily) basis and keep from losing the subscribers the don’t want daily emails?

After some thinking, I came up with one solution - create a weekly mailing list. However, I don’t advertise this option to anyone. When people join any list of mine they are in my “email frequent” list BUT when anyone unsubscribes from one or all of my lists, they receive a request to join my weekly list!

Then once a week I send a summary of the past week to this list. It takes a little extra time but in the long run, I think it will be worth it because the people on this list do what to hear from me just not on a daily basis.

On the unsubscribe page, you could also add a survey to find out why they are leaving the list and if it’s because of the amount of emails, then you can offer an alternative. While I’m not doing the survey right now, I do plan on adding one soon.

You can see my unsubscribe page at: http://aismarketing.com/unsubscribe.php

If you would like to discuss this post or other marketing topics, head on over to the AIS Forum by visiting: http://www.aisforum.net/forum/

Garrie

Posted by Garrie in General, List Building

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