As a small business owner, your email list should be considered gold. Building your list is essential if you want to grow your business by implementing profitable email marketing strategies.
The subscribers on your email list are the people who will take your surveys and answer your questions when you need feedback, become raving fans of your business, and potentially purchase your products in the future.
Truth be told, everyone wants email subscribers but once they get them, keeping them becomes a whole new challenge.
If you want to maintain your email list once you build it up, you’ll need to take good care of your subscribers by doing these things.
Give Them a Warm Welcome
It’s important to send all new subscribers a welcome message to show your gratitude toward them for taking an interest in receiving your email updates and also to set expectations so they know what to expect from your newsletters moving forward.
I always encourage new subscribers to email me with questions, feedback, or obstacles that they need help overcoming. This provides me with valuable content for my emails.
You can also include links to popular posts from your company or personal blog in the welcome email so people can learn more about you and what you have to offer.
It’s best to create a standard email template that you can automatically send to new subscribers vs. taking the time to manually email everyone one by one. Many email marketing service providers allow you to set this up easily.
Offer Value Consistently
The next thing you want to do is offer value consistently to your email list to keep them engaged. Whether you are selling something or not, your main focus should be on helping the person who’s reading your email.
If you’re looking for ideas on how you can provide value, consider sending your subscribers a survey to learn more about their needs. (Make it short — maybe five questions.) Consider sharing personal stories and lessons that were learned, industry news that affects most people, helpful tools and resources, and other valuable content.
Your emails don’t always have to be serious. They can also be entertaining as well and still provide value. When it comes to providing value, you also want to make sure you’re valuing each subscriber’s time.
Be sure to keep your emails concise and break up the paragraphs to make it easier to read. Super long messages may not get read if you don’t get to the point quickly.
You can also link to blog posts, articles, and resources to help get your point across. The key is to provide valuable content that doesn’t take the reader longer than a few minutes to digest. That way, your emails become enjoyable to read even for busy subscribers.
Offer Exclusivity
Another thing you might want to consider is offering exclusive content or freebies to only your email subscribers.
If you create free printable downloads that your audience loves, you can offer some of these printables only to email subscribers. You can also create content like an ebook or offer a discount on a new product you released solely to your email list.
Target Specific Needs With Your Email Content
If your business provides different services or if you have different subcategories on your website, you may want to segment your list so you can target your audience’s specific needs with your email content.
Segmenting your email list is one of the easiest ways to make sure certain emails reach the right people and avoid the wrong audience all while you are still able to maintain your entire email list and keep everyone happy.
Segmenting your email list may not be the best practice for some types of businesses, but for most, it will be. Let’s say you share graphic design tips and tutorials along with basic industry news with your email list.
Maybe some subscribers have expressed an interest in creating logos for new websites or you created a freebie that teaches this in order to get more sign ups.
The people on your list with more advanced skills may not be interested in tips for beginners per se, but you can create a segment for your email list that only includes the beginners so you can email them separately.
Once you segment your email list, you can still send mass messages to every subscriber if you want. Segmenting just creates more flexibility and allows you to better categorize your subscribers based on their specific needs and interests.
Be Authentic
Finally, you want to remember that being authentic is key. When emailing your list, you must feel free to let your personality shine through and be yourself.
Sometimes it’s not what you do but how you do it. If you are too salesy or have a wall up people will realize it and get turned off.
Turned off email subscribers usually don’t buy and unsubscribe. Why? Because they don’t feel like they know you and therefore, don’t trust you.
I’m not saying you have to tell your whole life story and be an open book, but it’s important to be honest and authentic. Don’t fabricate or lead people on and focus on helping them.
When being authentic, it’s natural that some people won’t resonate with the real you and will unsubscribe anyway. Don’t worry so much when this happens and you can actually view it as a good thing.
When it comes to your email list, it’s more about the quality rather than quantity. If people don’t like your content, it won’t really do you any good long term if they stay on your list which is why you never want to pressure people to stay on your list when they don’t want to.
Summary: Treat Your List How You’d Want to Be Treated
When it comes down to it, you really want to take care of your email list like how you’d want to be taken care of. Ask yourself if you would stop and read the emails you send out and why or why not regardless of your answer.
Consider what you like and don’t like about businesses that send out emails. What value do you get out of the emails? Do you feel like the content is properly targeted to meet your needs? Do you like the person or company sending the emails?
Go through your own email inbox and run a few case studies on the email lists you’ve subscribed to and use these tips to improve how you treat your list.
