Best Opt-In Email Marketing Tips
Your coworkers may think it’s weird, but the best way to improve the performance of your email marketing efforts is to decrease the size of your email list!
Opt-in email marketing has become the best practice for marketers to use in their email programs, and rightfully so! Asking your customers to sign up to your list, rather than adding them automatically (opt-out), has huge benefits. The following paragraphs outline how to improve, or launch for the first time, a winning opt-in email marketing campaign.
The Problem of Bad Subscribers
Even with an opt-in email marketing list, there will inevitably be those users that tire of your emails. Unfortunately, even though these subscribers opted in to the list, their lack of clicks and conversions severely decreases the overall performance of your opt-in email marketing campaigns. This not only causes money to be wasted on deadbeat subscribers, but also ruins the accuracy of any tests you run when working to optimize your email campaigns.
Even worse, sometimes these subscribers inaccurately mark your message as SPAM simply because they don’t like deleting the messages anymore! Obviously, deadbeat subscribers do way more harm than good, and one of the keys to sustaining a successful opt-in email marketing campaign is to regularly comb through your list, find these poor performers, and delete them!
How to Keep Deadbeat Subscribers from Wasting Your Money
Although removing poor performing opt-in email subscribers is important, if you find that overall the performance of your opt-in email marketing campaign is poor, rethink how they are subscribing.
1. Review your signup page sales copy (you do have this, right?)
Often, marketers implement a great way for customers to opt in, but don’t try and sell them the value of the newsletter first! Simply indicating how your newsletter will give the user value will increase your numbers and keep you clear of the SPAM filters!
2. Make it easy, but not too easy
Sure you want people to sign up, but by simply including an opt-in form for your email newsletters on your site’s homepage makes it too easy! Believe it or not, the best results come from making it a bit of a challenge to sign up in order to weed out those that will perform poorly anyways! I’m not talking super hard, simply including the sign up form on a dedicated opt-in page is sufficient, just make sure it takes a click or two to get there!
3. Contact the new subscriber ASAP
Once someone enters your opt-in email marketing campaign, send them an email right away welcoming them to the program, and explain exactly what they’re going to get. Make sure there are no surprises, and they will stay engaged!
4. Send out a survey
Sometimes the best way to troubleshoot your campaign is to ask your subscribers! Send out a survey to your opt-in list asking for their opinion, and definitely include some incentive to do so, such as 10% off or a free eBook. Let them know that the survey is short too! Even a survey of just 25 questions is on the high end.
If you are looking to improve your opt-in email marketing campaign, start with these steps. The important thing is to keep testing, and of course, to ensure that your opt-in email marketing software offers the above options (See our best email marketing software to research easy-to-use programs). Try different email frequencies, different content and different value offers, and when you find the combination that works, stick with it!
See our best email marketing software to learn about top rated email marketing programs.