Discover how often your subscribers want to receive your newsletters

So far we have not published a post on this on our blog and this segmentation is very important for improving the engagement with your subscribers, perhaps the most important step. When we talk about segmentation by frequency, this means creating subscriber lists based on their preferences regarding the number of campaigns sent to them.

This segmentation is not designed to improve delivery rates, open or click rates, but will reduce the number of unsubscribe requests. It doesn’t take a genius to intuit that if a subscriber wants to receive information, but only once per week (due, for example, to the fact he doesn’t have time to read a daily email) if you don’t offer a different option, very soon he will decide to unsubscribe.

It is precisely for these users of our email marketing platform which send a daily newsletter that we are creating this post, as in this case, it is almost mandatory to offer frequency options.

This is not a problem in itself, when you have important content to send, you can send as many newsletters as necessary, but there is a fine line between keeping subscribers informed and start losing contacts.

Therefore, you need to use the email marketing platform to offer an alternative and help your subscribers, by sending what they need, only when they want to receive it.

But it’s something technical for many users so this time we will offer a different solution, by using features you will find on our email marketing platform, without working with complex codes, but which is also very effective. Let’s see how we can do this in several steps:

The first step is always the same, contact your subscribers to know how many newsletters they want to receive.

This can be done by creating a survey newsletter with 4 different options, with a link to each alternative that directs the user to a page thanking him for the feedback:

At this point, it is important to consider that even if the user likes to receive newsletters from you, certainly many users will tend to protect their privacy, by selecting the most conservative options available. We can try to avoid it with a marketing technique widely used in department stores, place next to the item you want to sell other unattractive options.

For example:

1- Twice a day
2 Once a week
3- Biannual
4- Annual

Tip –  Offer something in exchange for the partcipation of your subscribers

As in all research and market studies, even if for your own subscribers, a good trick to get more reliable data is to encourage users to participate. A draw, or anything else you can offer can be very interesting and help you to keep your subscribers happy and thank them for having taken the time to answer your survey.

But there is a risk that by not finding an interesting alternative, the user could decide to not participate. Therefore we recommend you offer the option to change the frequency on each newsletter, for example in the header:

After the survey,  don’t ignore the results, you must separate users according to their preferences. To do this, You will have to check which users clicked on each link of your survey, or the header option and change subscribers to different groups based on the selected frequency option.

If you are doing this on our email marketing platform, click the Statistics menu -> Advanced Statistics to consult reports, separating the subscribers who clicked on each link. In the clickers tab, click Export, and open the downloaded CSV file. In this file, you can filter subscribers by clicked link to extract their email address.

These subscribers must be added or imported to a new group manually, using the advanced import option, (you will have to  check to Add existing subscribers), We recommend you create a different group per each frequency option.

For example:

GENERAL group (for your general campaign)

WEEKLY (for those who want to receive a single weekly newsletter)

MONTHLY (for those who wish to receive a monthly email)

This step may sound strange, but I’ll put an extreme example, which will be easily understood, if we ask how many times per year you want to go to the dentist, surely the answer would be no at all cases, but this is not true.

It is an exaggeration, but as we saw before the subscriber in order to protect his privacy, or because he thinks he won’t have time to read your emails, the user could end up choosing a very conservative option, when in fact he is interacting your campaigns now.

You could check the situation of each subscriber who wants to change the frequency, whether the user is not interacting with the emails or is satisfied with the current frequency, making an advanced search on the email marketing platform, reviewing all lists from the last six months and on the tabs views and clickers, you could manually search for the email address of this subscriber, to see how this user interacts with the campaigns.

If you see for instance a subscriber who is opening your campaigns almost every day, but selected to receive a weekly campaign, you could make a suggestion, for example by sending a message to explain he would get less content. But a suggestion! Never attempt to impose, as surely the subscriber would be angry if you didn’t respect his choice.

After assigning subscribers to the corresponding groups according to the selected frequency, the last step is to generate custom designs for the campaigns.

That is, if you send a daily campaign, you would have to create a newsletter  with a unique design to send on Mondays for those who requested to receive a weekly newsletter, or if you send an weekly email, you would have to create a design for the monthly campaign.

You should never send only the last campaign because the user would lose a lot of useful information, the best thing to do in this case is to send a summary with the most important content, with links to find more information.

A good tip is to include a first paragraph with the main content or cover that will also be used in the message header. Thus, you will be creating a custom campaign for each frequency, either weekly or monthly, for example:

CONCLUSION

These simple steps will help keep your subscribers always active, respecting the preferences of your contacts, avoiding many unsubscribe requests. You can work with your email marketing platform so as to understand the preferences of your subscribers.

Keep in mind that it is much easier and cheaper to keep a subscriber than get a new one.

Whatever you can do to improve the results of your email campaigns will help you to save money, and increase the interaction with your mailing list.