Set expectations for new subscribers

A common way to build your email address list is to provide a free resource such as an eBook or PDF in return for contact information from the reader.  While this is a good way to be mutually beneficial to the reader and the company, often the reader is providing their information only for the free resource and does not want to receive the emails.  This leads to sending to an unengaged recipient or worst, sending to a bad email address.
Another way to build your email address list is to pre-check the “subscribe to the mailing list” when a user creates an account on your site.  The same problem with the free resource offer, the user may not want the emails.
You can combat both of these types of unengaged users by providing them with an example of what they will be receiving from you via email.  Displaying the most recent mailing or providing them with how often you send out monthly will not only help you collect accurate information but also helps set the expectations of what the recipient will be receiving. Examples of sending expectations would be to inform the recipient that you only send once a month but then allow them to select an onboarding program that may send daily for 10 days.
Email.Simple-6Providing the end user with information about your mailings encourages them to provide accurate information and helps build your mailing list with recipients who want to engage with your emails. If you offer a free resource such as a whitepaper or ebook behind a signup form, send the download link within the email so that it encourages readers to provide accurate information.  By sending the email with a link the recipient clicks, it shows ISPs that this mail is wanted and helps boost your sending reputation.
 
 

Related Posts

Marketing pet peeves

Loren McDonald has a great post over at Mediapost listing his email marketing pet peeves. I particularly love this because he includes those things annoy him as a subscriber.
Most of what annoys me as a subscriber is sloppy marketing. Really is it so hard to actually check what you’re sending and who you’re sending it to?
elloIFNAME
This was a notice from Ello telling me that they’d get to my request for an account “at some point.” There were two fails here. The first is very obvious from the To: line. The second is even worse. I have an Ello account, I’m not waiting. Apparently they pulled their “current user” file and added it to the “waiting user” file and then mailed all of them a notice the accounts were getting turned on, albeit slowly.
The footer of the mail made it clear they knew they were spraying and praying:

Read More

4 email marketing myths

Tom Sather speaks about 4 email marketing myths that just won’t die. Tom has it absolutely right, these are things people believe that not true.

Read More

Email saves trees!

The arrival of my first spam email was a bit of a shock. I’d been on the internet for years by that point and had never seen junk mail in my inbox. Of course, the Internet was a very different place. The web was still a toddler. There was no email marketing industry. In fact, there wasn’t much commerce on the web at all. Much of the “surfing” I did was using gopher and ftp rather than the fancy new web browser called NCSA Mosaic. To share pictures we actually had to send printouts by postal mail.
It wasn’t just getting spam that was memorable (oh, great! now my inbox is going to look like my postal box, stuffed full of things I don’t want), it was the domain name: savetrees.com. Built into the domain name was an entire argument defending spam on the grounds of environmental friendliness. By sending spam instead of postal mail we could save the earth. Anyone who didn’t like it was morally corrupt and must hate the planet.
Why do I mention this history? During a discussion on a list for marketers earlier this week, multiple people mentioned that email marketing was clearly and obviously the much more environmentally sound way to do things. I mentioned this over on Facebook and one of my librarian friends (who was one of the people I was email friends with back in those early days) started doing her thing.
She posted her findings over on the Environmental News Bits blog: The comparative environmental impact of email and paper mail. It’s well worth a read, if only because a lot of companies have really looked into the issue in great detail. Much greater detail than I thought was being put into the issue.
I shared one of the links she found, the 2009 McAfee study, with the email marketing group discussing the issue. (You may want to put down the drinks before reading the next line.) It was universally panned as marketing and therefore the conclusions couldn’t be trusted.
Anyone who pays any attention knows that nothing we do and none of the choices we make are environmentally neutral. Plastic bags were supposed to save trees from becoming paper bags, but turned into an environmental mess of their own.
Simple slogans like “email saves trees” might make marketers feel better, and may have gained Cyberpromo a strong customer base in the early days. But the reality is different.

Read More