3 Tips for Building an Engaged Email List
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Growing your email list is an on-going task for most marketers, but your list means nothing if your subscribers aren’t engaging with what you’re sending. You want subscribers who open your emails, click your links, and ultimately enjoy the content that they receive.
When you’re growing your list, you want to be strategic. You can’t just add random email addresses– you want to make sure you’re adding people who are going to be interested in getting your emails, who want to read them and then hopefully make a purchase.
It’s quite simple– you want to add people to your lists who will be engaged. So how do you go about ensuring that the people on your list are going to be interested? How do you build a list in a sustainable and strategic way?
To help you on your way to building an engaged email list, here are 3 ideas:
- Ensure subscribers have truly opted in
To aid in successful list growth, and in turn, successful business growth, make sure the subscribers on your list actually opted in. This may seem obvious, but many marketers add clients and customers to their lists without actually asking whether they want to receive communications.
Worse, some marketing teams buy lists from shady sources. All reputable email service providers don’t allow these types of lists to be mailed to and you won’t get the results you’re looking for.
In order to have people on your lists that really do interact with your emails, they need to be interested in your business. That starts with a person who asked to receive your emails in the first place.
How you build your email list will determine how interested your subscribers are in your email, which in turn will allow email service providers to determine if your email is wanted and if it should be delivered to the inbox or spam folder. Getting your email in front of your readers is half the battle, using opted-in lists will help keep your email where you want it.
- Continually measure email list health
One the most valuable assets you have is your email list. This needs to be in tip-top shape to work well for your email strategy. One thing you can do is keep an eye on your email metrics like opens, click-to-open, and conversion rates. You probably already are tracking at least some of them, but they’re all key indicators of engagement.
A good way to know how your email marketing is doing is to create a benchmark of your email metrics. It’s simple to set up, but can make tracking email engagement much more easy to do. You can do this by taking an average of what you want to track, opens or clicks for example, from sent campaigns over a period of time.
This way you’ll know what your average open rate is, and can see how each email campaign compares to this standard you’ve created. You’ll then know how interested and engaged your readers are. Be sure the comparisons are of the same email types, only average newsletters with newsletters or promotional with promotional.
- Provide valuable content to your subscribers
Content can help keep your subscribers reading, and sharing your emails. Sharing email content is a good way to not only keep engagement high but to help ensure your emails continue to get to the inbox. In this age of social media, the more your email subscribers or customers share your content, the more potential new customers will see it.
Be sure you’re sending content that your subscribers value and change it up, you can’t always send promotional emails, be sure to add newsletters or blogs to the mix.
One way to keep your readers’ interest and email content fresh is with personalized content. Using any data from your mailing list you can make each email speak to the individual that you’re sending to. You can include information like birth date, recent purchases, or even t-shirt sizes.
And with dynamic content, you can include images specific to the reader. Interactive content can also keep your readers excited to read your emails and including a scratch-off promotion can increase your email click-throughs.
Wrap up
There are no easy ways to create an engaged email list, it’s something that you’ll need to work on regularly, but the 7 tips in Campaign Monitor’s infographic will help get you started. Tracking your email metrics is an excellent start to knowing how each email you send is performing, and it’s pretty simple to set up.
And for even more impact, try personalizing the content your readers are seeing. They’ll be more inclined to keep reading, clicking and buying, when they feel you know what they want.
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