How often should you email your email subscriber list?
One of interesting tweets today was a question “how often should you mail your newsletters to your subscribers?” by imsweetie
It is inevitable in most websites that we are compelled to leave our email ids. Even before we taste the products, we need to login with our valid email id, verify it by clicking the validation link via email, only then are we allowed to access the material. If we realize that the information is not of quality, its too late to return out of it.
Then follows a downpour of e-newsletters, most of them mere junk. Frivolous info or affiliate sales pages, just filling up your inbox and leave you. It’s annoying to differentiate the ones which are really useful from the junk. I personally prefer less number of important emails like hosting renewals and other ‘can’t do without’ emails only. To get rid of this, I created an email ID specially to subscribe for such forced subscription newsletters. I check the mails once a month, go through the subject line and select all, delete all. Is this what you want to happen to your email marketing campaign.
If this the scenario, how do you survive as an email marketer? What should you be doing with your list of subscribers?
My top 10 effective email marketing:
1) Build Credibility: Convey to your subscribers what they can expect in your newsletters candidly. (Well before they subscribe) and ho often you are going to contact them.
2) Keep your subscription as an option: Don’t compel people to subscribe to your list inorder to gain access to your info. If you think that this is a ridiculous tip as nobody would opt to get your newsletter, then you are accepting that you are not confident about the quality of your newsletter’s content. If that is the case, even if people subscribe to your list as an obligation, sooner or later they’d take a second to click the link to unsubscribe or click ‘spam’ button. This means very bad reputation for your business and join the black listed email ids list soon. If you are want to provide informative and useful information, describe about it on your website and let people know what to expect. If they are interested, they’d surely subscribe. If they are not interested, even if you force them to, they will not stick to your subscription for life.
3) Provide quality content and hot updates: The faster you cover news in your niche, the faster you can provide it to your subscribers. This way they start expecting action packed, informative emails from you.
4) Don’t mail too often or too rarely: 3 times a week should be more than sufficient depending on your niche and the kind of content you provide. If you have 2 or 3 categories of information, break it down to seperate emails and send in an organized fashion. This makes assimilation easy for your members or they’d just skip reading your mails altogether.
5) Grow a habit of expectancy: Schedule a day for sending emails. It could be a date in a month or a day in a week. EX; “You’ll receive an E-newsletter every Monday about Internet Marketing tips and hot news” or An e-zine will be sent to you every 1st Sunday. If you have multiple niches or categories, you could schedule alternate days or 1st Sunday for category 1, 2nd Sunday for category 2, and 3rd Sunday for category 3 etc for weeks Convey this to your subscribers during their signup process. So people know when to expect your email and what to expect in that. If they are impressed with the quality content you provide them, within few weeks, they will get used to the schedule and start expecting your newsletter on the day you mentioned.
6) Stick to your schedule: Think and plan about your schedule prior to putting it up for your visitors to view. Once you have it on your site, stick to it. Come what may, you will send your emails (well 99% cases).
7) Well in advance: If you have schedules your e-newsletter to every Monday, don’t wait to write up the content till Sunday. I recommend that you should have at least 5 e-newsletters made well in advance. Add latest news part, if any, just before sending, but the rest has to be pre-arranged. This will help you to maintain the quality of your newsletter and relieve you of stress about sending the mails at scheduled time. Working under pressure will definitely shoe lower results than working for pleasure.
Autopilot: If you are planning a vacation or busy tied up with some other project desperate for attention, you need not worry about that, if you set your e-newsletters on auto-pilot using an auto responder. There are many brands offering auto responder services for fee and for free. You can try get-response.com, a free service or aweber.com for fee. They charge $18 per month. The difference is obvious. Services which come for fee, are more professional and more user-friendly control panel. On the contrary, a free service will have ads placed on the newsletters and look amateur. If you don’t want to consider spending $18 recurring investment for an auto-responder, you can go for your own auto responder with no ads and will be installed on your hosting account. This will cost only a month;s fee of paid responders.
9) Respect their privacy: Nothing will put them off than sharing your email list with spammers or even your friends and family. They trusted you and shared their valuable information with you and the least they expect is to receive a spam mail.
10)Max number of emails allowed per week. This is a little difficult to generalize as each situation relative. If you are starting as a beginner, 1 email per week on a previously schedules and specified day is what I suggest. This will buy you enough time to produce quality content, design and send across. If you are an established guru in your niche, then a maximum of three exceptional quality newsletters are allowable per week.
Its not just acquiring email lists, it is all about retaining and growing that list and gain a loyal following.
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