The plan must first be in place before you start collecting recipients. You need to know what happens after your potential customers have signed up, what they receive and how they are segmented. Read how you can avoid the biggest mistake.<\/p>\n
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The first good advice is essential. You must have a plan for, what the customers should receive after they have signed up for your mailing list. However, although it should be obvious – most companies do not have this plan in place. \u201cA good welcome flow that takes good care of the new recipient of the company’s newsletter, makes all the difference between success and failure,\u201d says Kim \u00d8stergaard from the email marketing company MarketingPlatform. The first email in a welcome flow has a 6 times higher opening rate than the regular weekly newsletters. In addition, if you put a series of three well-composed welcome emails together, and look on the importance of customer loyalty, their activity over time, there will be a huge difference. By thinking about expectations, by activating the recipients quickly, the value of an email marketing database will often double, show number of foreign surveys.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Use double-opt-in when your recipients should sign up for your newsletter. This way, you ensure that the customers have written a correct email address, that they exist, are the ones who they say to be, and that there are no malicious competitors who sign up SPAM traps to your lists.<\/p>\n
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You need to have control over how your recipients are stored. You must not have one list in your CMS or shop – and another list in your newsletter system. You must therefore choose an email marketing system that can easily be integrated with your other systems. Either through a simple sign up form that can send the data down into both systems at once, or with an easier integration through a web service (also called an API or XML API).<\/p>\n
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The field source must always follow your recipients on the mailing list. It is important to know whether the good recipients come from your Facebook sign up activities, from your own www page, from sign ups in the stores (if you are, for example, a retail chain) or from a completely different channel. By good recipients is meant those who open your emails, show activity, and click on or gain other of your goal conversions. For example, a goal conversion or KPI could be forwarding the newsletter to a friend, updating profile or buying something from your shop etc.<\/p>\n
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The fifth good advice goes against many commercial interests in the Internet industry: NEVER ever buy recipients for your newsletter and mailing list. It can be tempting to buy 50.000 or 100.000 recipients, but it is in the best case not worth the money – in the worst case, it can be a disaster for your business. Most \u201cbuy-lists\u201d are full with SPAM-traps that will destroy the value of your entire mailing list. A SPAM-trap is old addresses, that the recipient has stopped using 1-2 years ago, and that the receiver mail server, for example, TDC, Hotmail, Gmail or others have made a trap. If you hit just one of these in your sending, you can risk that all emails to for example, Hotmail are moved into the SPAM folder – in worst case completely deleted.<\/p>\n
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What does the recipient get from being on your list? Why can\u2019t they just sometimes look on your page – and decide for themselves when they will interact with your company? Seen from the company\u2019s side, the answer is quite clear – because there is good money in having a well-functioning email marketing database. The visit frequency will be much higher and therefore we will encourage the customers\u2019 repurchase rate. The users, or short, the recipients, want to be heard. They will have customized messages that show that your company has heard their areas of interest. It doesn\u2019t need to be the big model with behavioral content – just the simple one with 3-4 areas, that they can sign off in sign up flow or a later enrichment flow. It could also be the more personal form, where the newsletter has a real sender that the target group can identify with – or good advice and tips. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be bonus points or cash benefits. Achieving a dialogue has a greater long-term value\u201d, says Kim \u00d8stergaard. Therefore, it is important to choose an email marketing system where customers can easily enrich their profile, and where the customers\u2019 areas of interest can be inserted as dynamic content in the weekly email. Otherwise, your company will inflict huge amounts of extra work on itself. And what will happen in the practice is that you will continue to send the same message to all recipients.<\/p>\n
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Many companies completely forget the location of the sign up form (registration form) on their website. A good location is not only on the front page. Many people do not see your front page at all. Therefore, the form must always be in the footer area (area at the bottom of the page found on all pages) or at the top of the page.<\/p>\n
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Facebook is a great place for collecting signups for your newsletter. In addition, many companies have more likes on Facebook than they have recipients on the mailing list, which provides a good basis for collecting new sign ups. There are many different CMS systems that can integrate with Facebook through their API. WordPress, which is free, has some great opportunities, where the content of the Facebook page can be managed through the CMS solution. This means that sign up form from email marketing system can be maintained in, for example, WordPress, and contests and other incentives for signing up – can be easily changed and presented graphically.<\/p>\n
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