How to Retain Email Subscribers (when they only want a freebie from you)?

Let me start with this: Email marketing STILL works!

It works even more effectively than it used to work a decade ago.

Email marketing might sound to be an old school marketing tactic – but it does its job much more effectively!

And if you are neglecting email marketing just because you think its old school or that it has become ineffective, you are definitely missing out!

I can go on and on talking about the benefits of email – but here’s the thing. Do NOT ignore email marketing thinking it is old school!

There might be MANY new and shiny marketing techniques that are introduced.

But email marketing is still a way to personally connect with your potential customers.

You get to land directly into their inbox! That’s a golden opportunity, isn’t?

Let me briefly point out the benefits of email marketing –

It’s too easy not to try!

Now, tell me – if someone is using the internet, chances are that they have an email account, right?

I’m not saying that everyone can send and read emails but compared to other complicated, tech savvy marketing techniques, email is much easier.

Personalization

Unlike a common blog post or a social media update you write for the masses, emails can be personalized.

That doesn’t mean you have to write 10K emails if you have a list of 10K subscribers.

But technology has made it possible to make the emails more personalized.

Email autoresponder services like Aweber make it easier to address each person by name while you write a common mail for your list.

Cut through the noise

Social media platforms are quite noisy – your message is more likely to get lost in the noise if not sent out at the right time with the right kind of effort.

But the email you send cuts through 90% of the noise and lands directly in the inbox of your potential customer!

You can easily build relationships

Yup! Unlike other marketing tactics, email gives you a greater chance to build genuine connection with your subscribers.

However it is sad that most people misuse it or don’t use it at all.

You can target and target even more

You can build specific lists for specific businesses, if you run multiple online businesses like me.

So you can send customized, tailored messages for subscribers in each of your list.

However, this level of targeting might not be enough for your business.

You might want to target even more, say in the lines of sending a specific message to only people who opened your last email, or people who have been continuously opening your emails over the past 2 months and so on.

As I said, I can go on and on listing the benefits of email marketing. But that’s not really the scope of this post.

I just wanted to stress the fact that you shouldn’t ignore email marketing no matter what advanced marketing techniques you embed into your business plan!

So….

Why do people unsubscribe?

Alright, now coming back to the focus of this post…

Before we talk about how to stop your list subscribers from unsubscribing, it would be highly useful to find out *why* your subscribers would want to unsubscribe, right?

That makes total sense to me.

Relevancy is missing

We talk about relevancy when it comes to websites, content marketing and SEO. We are so cautious to create contextual content.

We do keyword research and make sure we deliver what people are expecting when they land on our websites.

We think about relevancy at all these times.

But do we consider relevancy when it comes to email marketing? Let’s get real for a second.

You land on a page on some website and you see a beautifully designed sign up form that promises to teach you the ins and outs of content marketing.

You are interested and you sign up.

So you get a “freebie” that’s related to content marketing and after a week you start getting emails that talk about Youtube videos or Adsense ads or continuous sales/affiliate emails that keep promoting product after product.

Will you stay on that list? No, you won’t. You will unsubscribe, right?

[clickToTweet tweet=”Do to others as you would like or expect them to do to you! #emailmarketing” quote=”Do to others as you would like or expect them to do to you! #emailmarketing” theme=”style4″]

Long, boring emails

Everyone is busy these days and it is highly challenging to get people to stop and listen to you for a second.

That is why you have to be incredibly useful these days. However being a talkative doesn’t help here.

Unless you are delivering a course by email, in which case the lessons have to be longer, there is no reason you should write long emails regularly.

First, people won’t have the time.

Second, even if they are willing to spend time on emails in general, they won’t have enough patience and/or attention to read your long emails.

By writing long emails you are ruining that extra edge you get via email marketing – you get to land directly on their inbox directly, cutting through all the noise – but then, that privilege goes wasted.

Too frequent emails

Again, just because they gave you permission to land on their inbox doesn’t mean you can hit them whenever you want.

You have to be very cautious about timing your emails.

I am sure that you send either autoresponder emails or broadcast emails, or a mix of both like I do.

But you have to make sure that the emails don’t hit your subscriber’s face quite often.

They say one or two emails per week is ideal. Keep the frequency low and quality very high.

If you are not annoying you can avoid people unsubscribing from your list.

I have unsubscribed from a lot of lists just because I get too frequent emails from them.

Too infrequent emails

On the flip side, sending emails very less frequently will make them forget you.

Sending one email per month or whenever you feel like it won’t strike it.

If people forget you and if they forget why they subscribed to you, whenever they cleanup their subscriptions, they are simply going to unsubscribe.

There are services like Unroll.me (which I use heavily) to bulk unsubscribe – I do a regular cleanup so I stay sane.

My email inbox gives me a lot of business/money making opportunities; so it is my response to keep it clean and keep myself sane.

I guess your inbox is valuable too. And yes, your subscriber will also think the same way!

Too much selling in emails

Now, I have nothing against selling. Of course, if you are doing business you gotta sell something.

And while you build lists to create connection between you and your customers, you also have it in your plan to sell to your list, right? This is perfectly OK.

What I am talking here is too much selling – as if your subscribers are there just to hear you talking about your own products and others’ products that you recommend.

There should be a 80/20 ratio here (at the very rough scale) – 80% of high quality, useful, adorable content via email and 20% of your salesy emails.

And in that 20% make sure you don’t sound plain, fat, annoyingly salesy 🙂

You don’t make them feel special

This point is getting important by the minute.

Earlier you can simply play the king if you have a high quality business set up – people will line up and listen to you.

Now there are loads of places where people can get what they want. Unless you make them feel special, they are not going to stay with you.

I can say this from my experience.

I ruthlessly unsubscribe from people who don’t treat me special.

But I stay subscribed to certain lists just because of the way they treat me.

How can you make them feel special?