Email Newsletter Marketing Tips Boost Loyalty

Email newsletter marketing requires building a list of thousands or even tens of thousands of email addresses. The process takes not just months, but years. The patience is usually worth it.

Such a long-term focus pays off for a website with a list of loyal visitors who come to the site more often. Their visit frequency boosts page views, ad inventory and response rate.

Consider the following impact of an effective email campaign with the goal of increasing visits to the host website. Nudging frequency of visits from 3.0 to 3.1 per month with a site of 1 million unique visitors and average pages per visit of 6.0 will:

1. Boost monthly page views by 600,000.
2. Increase ad inventory by 1.8 million impressions at three ads per page.

If the average revenue per thousand page views (RPM) is $10, the potential revenue increase is $180,000 a month.

Talk about building value.

The above numbers should not intimidate publishers or business owners of smaller sites. The potential impact on a site with 1,000 visits a month is just as strong.

Email newsletters commonly deliver daily, weekly or monthly. Some sites do all three with multiple subjects depending on the content, the size of the site and how often it has new content.

7 Email Newsletter Marketing Tips

Here are a few tips on email marketing:

1. Make the subject line as unique and interesting as possible.
2. The open rate — how many subscribers actually open the email to view it — is a function of the subject line first and the content second.  The click rate is a function purely of the content. Don’t be surprised if both numbers are well under 50 percent.
3. Include five to 10 titles or headlines for a quick read at the top of the email. Make sure the subscribers scroll as little as possible. Otherwise, click rates will drop.
4. Send it earlier rather than later in the day because a large number of people receive them at work. They should not read it the next day when the information is stale. Avoid Monday mornings and Friday afternoons when subscribers are adjusting to and from the weekends.
5. Promote on the website with prominent standing links and display ads.
6. Set up opt-in or opt-out boxes throughout the site where people register for other benefits such as contests.
7. Use popups registration boxes sparingly. They are both effective and highly annoying to site visitors.

How to Build a Better Email Database

One of the most important rules about building a high-quality email marketing database is a negative. Don’t buy a list of emails.

The quality of the list is usually poor. It contains emails of people who signed up for something else and not for the site that is buying the list.

Marketers or business owners who buy a list almost always see many of these new subscribers unsubscribe from the newsletter because they didn’t opt into it.

For the same reason, don’t take a list of emails from another company project and start sending those people a newsletter they didn’t want. Not only will they unsubscribe, but they also may file abuse complaints. This is spam and against the law.

Building a high-quality list requires following tactics such as the seven above because they allow the subscriber to choose the newsletter. Some of them will unsubscribe, and some will change their email addresses.

Churn is normal with email marketing. Gaining more subscribers at a faster pace than losing them is an important goal. That net gain of subscribers will drive up site loyalty and frequency of visits.

A big database of subscribers takes years to develop, but eventually the site numbers will jump noticeably whenever a newsletter goes out to a large list. The day you notice the bump is the day you will be especially glad you put the effort into it.

Email newsletter marketing requires great patience for the time it takes to build a worthwhile list. It is a long-term investment that certainly pays off — in the long term.