Capturing a few email addresses from prospects or customers only to have them unsubscribe a few emails later is frustrating, but keeping subscribers around long enough to engage in repeated buying cycles is more likely to happen when you employ a few retention tactics before you even send the first email to a new subscriber.
According to a 2006 Epsilon Interactive consumer e-mail study, 73 percent of consumers will unsubscribe if they feel that a company sends e-mail too frequently. Determining proper frequency is challenging because consumers are willing to tolerate almost any email frequency as long as they feel your email content is relevant and valuable to them.
Staying in tune with your audience in order to deliver on their email content preferences is essential to subscriber retention, but don’t forget to make sure your audience is in tune with your intentions by setting frequency and content expectations upon sign up. According to a July 25, 2007 “Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study,” by The Email Experience Council/RetailEmail.Blogspot, less than 7% of major online retailers give subscribers any kind of idea how many emails to expect.
Instead of hooking subscribers in with an offer to Join Your Email Blast, include frequency and content verbiage in your subscriber offers. For example, if your company intends to send weekly email coupons to your list, ask new potential subscribers to Sign Up for Wednesday Web-Savers.
Setting frequency and content expectations for your list subscribers not only reduces the number of subscribers who are surprised by your email messaging frequency, it helps you to segment your subscribers into interest categories so you can focus your value propositions on the characteristics inherent in each email subscription offer you create.
John Arnold is the Regional Development Director for Constant Contact, and author of the book Email Marketing for Dummies.
