Despite the plethora of social media options for marketers today, good old email is still one of the smartest marketing tools you can use to attract and keep customers. In today’s guest post, Paul Turnbull shares four tips for engaging customers via email marketing.

Maintaining customer relationships is a key part of having a successful email marketing campaign.  It’s also important to remember that you should nurture these relationships every month of the year.  Integrating these simple tactics for email list building and maintenance can strengthen the value of your email program every day of the year:

Tip #1:  Target & Engage Your Subscribers: Your email campaigns should be very targeted and personal.  Use different sign up forms to track each contact source and test different approaches to see what works best for each.  Over time, by reviewing the level of interaction your email campaigns receive, you can see which sources generally have the most engaged contacts and segment future campaigns accordingly.

Tip: #2: Be Honest & Valuable: Build your relationship with your audience by setting expectations up front.  Don’t subtly try to trick people into opting into your list – instead, make it clear and compelling.  Getting more or different emails than expected is a typical reason people unsubscribe or worse, mark as spam later on.  Make it easy for subscribers to adjust their email preferences or let you know what they would like changed or improved to make your emails more valuable, ideally before they unsubscribe from your mailings.

Tip: #3:  Grow & Maintain Your Email List: Purchasing or harvesting a list will never yield the same quality as a permission-based list you build yourself.  When building a quality mailing list, it is just as important to maintain the list to ensure it performs well.  Remove inactive recipients as they can negatively impact your reputation over time.  One of the many metrics a reputation system uses to evaluate reputation is engagement.  A high amount of interaction creates a strong signal to the ISP that your email is wanted, anticipated and appreciated.  Therefore, it is in their (and your) best interest to place the email in the inbox.

Tip #4:  Keep Them Interested: Re-engaging inactive subscribers is easy.  First, determine what an appropriate period of inactivity is.  Depending on the nature of your business, frequency of your emails, and the expectation you’ve set with your subscribers, this amount of time will vary.  For instance, a “daily deals” sender may want to re-engage inactive subscribers after four months of inactivity basis whereas a monthly newsletter sender may want to wait 12 months.

To re-engage, send a survey request or a simple email asking them to re-confirm their subscription by clicking on a call-to-action.  The call-to-action is a tracked link pointing to a page on your website that thanks them for re-confirming and provides additional information, such as white listing instructions or a mailing schedule, so people know what to expect. Following 10 to 14 days after sending the re-engagement email, remove those people who did not click the call-to-action.

Paul Turnbull is the Product Manager for Campaigner® and is responsible for product design and providing an easy to use email marketing solution for small-medium businesses. He can be reached at paul.turnbull@j2global.com.

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