HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR EMAIL LIST
Additionally, depending on the frequency and content of your emails, distributing consistently on a Monday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday will generally lead to strong results. If subscribers come to know and trust that your newsletter will arrive every Monday at 5 p.m.; or Sunday at 7 a.m., - your open rates are likely to be higher than if you distribute inconsistently on Tuesday through Thursday.
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Your Take Away - In general, Tuesday through Thursday are optimal days to send emails. However, if your company's offering is relevant to your subscribers' or customers' weekend lives, consider testing different distribution times on Saturday and Sunday. And try to establish consistency so that you readers come to expect and anticipate the
arrival of your email.
Improve Results by Growing Your List - Because of its lower distribution costs relative to other forms of marketing, many email marketers mistakenly place too much emphasis on growing the size of their email list. Obviously, increasing the size of your email list is a good thing, but a quality list of active, interested and motivated subscribers/customers is really the end game on which you should focus.
In the simple example above, an online retailer selling products at an average order size of $100 could see an increase of 28 percent in revenue by taking steps to improve relevance and conversion. Consider taking steps to clean out the dead wood in your list, but at minimum, reduce the energy you spend on your inactive members.
So how do you get more out of your golden subscribers/customers? Relevance! Here are a few tips:
_ Switch to double opt in.
_ Never pre-check the sign-up boxes.
_ Deliver on whatever promises you make in the sign-up process.
_ Collect as much information on subscribers as you can that will enable you to deliver segmented and person
alize messages, without driving too many away from the sign-up process.
_ Segment your subscribers into a modest number of groups for which you are then able to deliver relevant, tar
geted and personalized messages.
_ Test, test, test. Try different offers, formats, types of subject lines, distribution days/times and other variables. _ Don't stop at open and click-through tracking; use Web-site action tracking to accurately understand what variables are driving the most desired actions.
_ Consider follow-up campaigns and trigger-based emails that are sent to subscribers when they do or do not take a specific action such as not opening an email or clicking on a specific link.
Your Take Away: Focus as much, if not more, of your resources and energy on getting a greater response out of your interested/motivated list members. Do take steps to build your list, but place increased emphasis on quality and the collection of more demographic and preference information that will enable you to deliver more targeted and personalized emails.