In an earlier article, we discussed the concept of bacn and the danger in ignoring what’s happening with your mailing list.
In the end, among comments from other users, such as the one by Javier Cordero, we all had to agree that it is a current phenomenon, which to a greater or lesser extent affects everything we do in email marketing. There is a drop in subscriber interest and little by little they stop interacting with our newsletters, they don’t respond, they don’t click, or even don’t open the emails.
They don’t cancel the subscription, but you can see that they have lost interest.
It is very easy to detect this type of subscriber, almost all email marketing services and Mailrelay is no exception, will allow you to review your open rates, click-through rates, use advanced filters, plus some tools to determine the health of your database.
If you detect that statistics indicate that your subscribers are interacting with your newsletters less often, it’s time to do something to change this situation, before it’s too late.
What can we do to create engagement with our subscribers?
People are curious by nature; we are attracted to everything that is new, this is why it will be probable that your new subscribers will be very participative, at least those who have signed up voluntarily, because they were truly interested in what you were offering in exchange for their email address.
Over time, subscribers are likely to get used to you, and that means they will start to react less when receiving your messages. To prevent that from happening, I would like to give you some tips, so your subscribers will not get bored:
1) Make changes from time to time.
This is something essential and something that you can see everywhere. Many supermarkets change their products of place from time to time, the television channels change their schedule, even the kiosk owners change the magazines to other stands so that customers don’t get used to it. The purpose of this strategy is to create the sensation that something is different, to get our attention, because if things are not always in the same place, we will have to spend more time looking for what we want, and that way maybe we will end up seeing other things we were not looking for, or remember something that we should buy but we had forgotten.
In our email marketing strategy, in our newsletters, we can do the same, we can change the frequency of campaigns, the day of the week, the tone, even the design.
These changes will make your newsletters more attractive for a while.
2) Send unique content
From time to time, it pays to include some exclusive content in your newsletter for your subscribers. It can be an ebook, a guide, a video, even a discount or access to your VIP content.
In many cases, your subscribers will appreciate something as simple as the possibility of acquiring your products before other users, because you are offering preferential treatment for your loyal subscribers. They will feel cherished and will be more prone to start interacting with your newsletters.
3) Collaborate with colleagues
If you are looking for a collaboration with another person in your niche, another blogger, entrepreneur, etc. You can agree to prepare a guest post and send it to your subscribers as well, as long as it is on a topic related to your niche, because if you send something about a totally different subject, this could have the opposite effect and generate unsubscribe requests.
In this way, your subscribers receive content from another person, with a different format, expressions, and structure from what you send them usually. It can be a refreshing change for your subscribers who will appreciate the novelty.
By exchanging guest posts, you can also find new readers, attract visitors and get more customers.
4) Talk to your audience
What is email marketing? First of all, communication, but bidirectional communication, which means you will not only send notifications to your subscribers.
You will need to interact directly with them, inviting them to respond to your messages. Ask them what they would like to receive, their opinion, for suggestions, recommendations or try to make them feel part of the process and not just readers.
The usual thing is for your subscribers to respond to direct questions, generating communication and trust on your brand. They will like to know that you care about them and are interested in their opinion.
You can ask them to leave their opinion on the blog, to continue to keep in touch on your website. This worked very well for us when we created a post talking about our new free account.
5) Gamification for email marketing
I have not tried this personally, yet! But it looks like a very interesting and fun option for creating engagement. The idea is to create a type of game that you will send by email.
For example, suppose you want to send a discount coupon to your subscribers. Instead of sending the coupon directly, you can create an image with the coupon. You could split this image into several parts, two for example, and send each part in a different newsletter.
In this way, we would be creating an expectation in our subscribers, as they would have to wait to receive the next email. In addition, they certainly would open this message as they are interested in receiving your content.
6) Gamification, second option
Another variant of the previous point, a little more complex, but that could give more results regarding engagement on social networks, would be to create a kind of puzzle with several images, the challenge would be to find two identical images to win.
How would this email marketing campaign work? It’s actually very simple. It would be necessary to prepare a series of images, about 10, for example. The next step would be to duplicate them, to have 20 images, 10 pairs of duplicated images.
You would need 10 vouchers, which would be divided and added to the images. To do that, you would have to write half of the voucher in the first part of each image and the other half on the rest of the pictures. To discover the correct voucher, the user would have to find each pair and match them.
The next step will be to target our subscriber list to send 1 different image for each group, with instructions on how to participate in the contest.
So when the subscribers receive the first part of the voucher, they will have to comment on the blog to share their piece of the code and get to use it. It’s something you can do with a simple email that will create more engagement with your subscribers. This is a fun way of entertaining the people who always interact with your messages.
7) Target and adapt your strategy to your subscribers
Even if you give your subscribers options to change the frequency of the newsletters they receive, you can take the next step and use filters to try to find out all the subscribers who are losing interest and change them from group or send them a specific message, trying to identify their interests and convince them to start interacting with your campaigns again.
These are tips for trying to slightly vary your emails, to try to maintain the interest of your subscribers for as long as possible.
However, the most important thing to keep in mind is:
You need to get new subscribers.
This is critical, because sooner or later, no matter what we do, the subscribers will end up getting tired, and we will need to replace them with new leads.
The goal is to have a positive flow that will increase our databases, to get the most out of our email marketing campaigns.
By the way, you can download all the icons we use in this post, and some others, clicking on this link.
What other methods do you propose for keeping the interest of your subscribers?