Among the many benefits of email marketing is the potentially high returns from low costs. While the amount you spend on gaining subscribers will vary, the cost of maintaining your list can be relatively inexpensive. You can quickly build a strong relationship with readers, offer value, and earn steady income from promotions. A common problem, however, is keeping subscribers engaged. Lists can be burnt out quickly through excessive promotion, leading to lower open rates. The key to good engagement is to avoid predictability, offering a variety of email styles that keep people guessing. The following seven email ideas can be rotated to provide a regular flow of interesting, incisive, and unexpected messages.
How-To Tutorial
A how-to email is typically a short tutorial offering some practical help. You could include all details in a single message, though longer tutorials might need to be spread across an email series. An alternative method is to create a long blog post, taking a short segment of it for an email. When you offer more detail on your blog, your email click-through rate should be high.
Story
A story helps to build rapport, improving the relationship you have with readers. Stories can be used to promote products, drive visitors to your blog, or simply to impart some wisdom. Successful salespeople understand the power of a good story, so starting to integrate them into regular emails is a way to improve your conversion rate.
Survey
Surveys will provide valuable information about your list, but you can also use them to engage readers. Providing a summary of the results will be of interest to many readers, particularly if they can be weaved into an interesting narrative. Not all surveys need to be extensive, with a simple question often helping to spark conversation.
Social Media
Social media and email are often used separately, but you can cross-promote effectively with email. One option is to collate the best social media posts of the week or month. Many businesses have Facebook groups for product owners or niche fans, so you could recommend the best discussions found within the group. While social media messages can be effective, using them sporadically is recommended as anyone with a strong interest will already follow you closely on the social sites.
Roundup Post
A roundup post gathers together news, articles, videos, or a combination of them all. Readers might not have the time to look through multiple blogs and news sites, so they could come to rely on you to curate content. A regular roundup post also helps forge strong industry relationships when you include other influencers in your collection.
Free Gift
A free gift could be a sporadic event that keeps subscribers opening messages. It is important to make the gift valuable on its own, but it could also be used as an enticement into a premium product. If you don’t want to create your own gifts, partner with other businesses to offer discount codes, ebooks, and subscriber benefits.
Promotion
Promotions are an inevitable part of email marketing, whether you are promoting your own product or as an affiliate. As long as you believe in the product and can convey this well, there is no need to feel uncomfortable about trying to sell products. Subscribers are often glad to find out about new products, particularly if there is a discount or bonus included.
These seven ideas should be enough to keep most lists engaged, with enough variety within each idea to avoid repetitiveness. Most lists won’t receive messages on a daily basis, so each idea won’t appear on too frequent a basis. It is, however, natural that a certain portion of your subscribers will stop opening your emails. While you have to accept there is always churn in email marketing, you can try more direct tactics to try and reignite interest. For most subscribers, though, a steady flow of interesting emails, without too much repetition, should be enough to maintain an engaged list.