It’s critical to let your readers know exactly what they can expect from you before they agree to opt in to your newsletter or email marketing program. You must meet and/or exceed those expectations throughout your relationship with them. By doing this, you effectively engage your readers who will look forward to your messages and act on them.

If you fail to meet expectations at crucial points during the relationship, your subscribers may become inactive/non readers or opt-out altogether.  The following are some key touch points to prevent them becoming inactive:

• Be clear what they are getting before and during opt-in. 
• Advise them of your privacy policy. 
• Ensure they get a confirmation email/thank-you page. 
• Send a “Welcome” communication 
• Standardise your email design/email format
• Advise them of your unsubscribe procedure.

Key Principles in Managing Expectations
The following basic principles apply in managing reader relationship: 

• Be transparent. Tell readers exactly what will happen when, what they have to do to meet their own objectives (subscribing, changing preferences, unsubscribing), what you will do with their data and what you will not do.
• Be clear, concise and simple.  Copy, instructions and policies should be written in plain language, and every action should be intuitive and easy. Give your brand or company a prominent place in the inbox so readers recognize it immediately.
• Give options and alternatives. Your readers are different. They expect you to provide them content and value in ways that meet their individual needs. Offer multiple communication channels, differentiate between them and learn to talk to them about what interests them and in their preferred format e.g. HTML, text or mobile-friendly. Then, stick to their choices.
• Under-promise, over-deliver. If you promote “Special Email-Only Offers,” be sure to deliver on that promise. 
• Only request what you need. Don’t ask for data that you don’t plan to use or doesn’t add value to you building a relationship with them.
• Monitor and solicit feedback. You can’t please everyone no matter how good your email marketing. Get feedback and find out why the inactive are not responding early in the email relationship. Track and monitor opt-in form conversion rates, unsubscribe rates and other areas to any uncover potential problems.

Tags: email marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Email Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.