Category: Learning Zone

Why You Might Want to Prune Your Subscriber List

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Your Subscriber List

If you have been building your list for any period of time it is a good bet that you will have a varied group of people on your subscriber list.

It is likely that they could fit into the following categories:

  • super fans – open all or almost all of your emails, click on links and take the action you want them to take
  • fans – open most of your emails and click on your links more often than not
  • lukewarm subscribers – open some of your emails and click your links sometimes
  • cold subscribers – open the occasional email but rarely, if ever, click anything
  • dead subscribers – no activity at all.

Don’t think twice about removing inactive people from your subscriber list, rather like you would remove dead leaves from a plant.

The cold subscribers are good candidates for pruning too – especially if they used to open your emails in the past but have stopped doing so for a few months or so.

The benefits of this include:

  • you are no longer sending emails to people who don’t want to hear from you any more
  • you reduce the likelihood of getting spam complaints from people who are on your list but had forgotten they had signed up
  • your overall open rates will increase as you will have a smaller but more responsive list.
  • if you have a very large list it could end up saving you money in reduced fees.

 

If You Make A Major Change Tell Your List In Advance

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Email Marketing Tips

Email Marketing Tips: Imagine if you had a standing arrangement with a good friend of yours that you would show up at their house every other week.

You would enjoy each other’s company, pass the time and share interesting news and gossip and then arrange to do the same thing in a couple of week’s time.

Now imagine if you suddenly thought it would be a good idea to turn up every other day instead…and just started to do so without a word of warning to your friend.

It would first seem a little odd and then it would begin to put a real strain on your relationship as you would quickly begin to intrude too much into your friend’s life.

In all likelihood your friend would probably ask you not to show up at his house at all…and that it wouldn’t take too long for them to reach this conclusion.

You can probably see where I am going with this already.

If you send out regular emails to your RocketResponder list then your subscribers will have become used to the frequency with which they hear from you.

If you make a slight change – especially if it is for a limited time – then that is ok but if you are going to dramatically change the frequency at which you send out emails then you should warn your list in advance.

Just a note to explain the change and the reason behind it could save you a lot of unhappy subscribers and a lot of unnecessary unsubscribes.

 

Adding A Picture To Your Emails

Patrick Griffin 1 Comment

Adding A Picture To Your Emails

Adding A Picture To Your Emails

I get a little annoyed when I hear people talking about their list as merely a marketing resource.

Yes your RocketResponder list can be a very valuable marketing resource…but it is much more than that.

Your list, first and foremost, is a collection of individual people, human beings with their own distinct personalities, likes and dislikes.

So when you communicate with them then you must always remember that you are talking to a group of individual humans and not just your marketing list.

An easy way of showing that you value the personal touch is by showing your subscribers that you are human too.

One way we do that at TimTech is by including our photographs on emails when we contact our subscribers.

Here are a couple of recent examples to show you what I mean:

Adding A Picture To Your Emails 1

Adding A Picture To Your Emails 2

Why not try the same thing for yourself.

Be yourself. Be personal. Show your subscribers that you care. Adding a picture to your emails is one way of doing just that.

Three Top Tips For An Autoresponder Email Series

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Autoresponder Email Series

There are times when it is difficult to know just what to write about for your autoresponder email series.

You are using RocketResponder to build up a nice list of subscribers but just what are you going to tell them?

Fear not because here are three quick top tips to get you thinking along the right lines:

  1. Make the difficult simple – You had to learn the stuff you know about right? Well, so will the people who are new to the niche you are expert in. Make an email series, or a series of email series, explaining some of the key products you sell or some of the key concepts relevant to your niche.
  2. Share your secrets – Be open and upfront with your tricks of the trade. I am not suggesting you give away all your most sensitive trade secrets but use your experience to give others a step up the ladder.
  3. Build up interest at key times – Do you have a big launch coming up or is there a big event happening in your niche. Don’t wait until the day to tell people about this but build up hype and interest in the weeks leading up to it. Then when the big day actually comes you know that your list will be as responsive as it possibly can be. Just don’t over do it though or you run the risk of making your list sick and tired of the event by the time it comes round.

There are three quick ideas and I am sure that once you start thinking about communicating with your subscribers, that you will find many more ideas of your own.

Now all you have to do is get writing.

Just A Reminder About Why You Are Here

Patrick Griffin 1 Comment

yes checkbox

Everybody you send an email to has got something in common…each of your email subscribers has given you permission to contact them.

But, being human, sometimes we forget that we have signed up to any given list in the first place.

So you could do your email subscribers a favor by reminding them of how they got to be on your list in the first place.

A cool way to do this is to include a little blurb in the footer of every email you send out.

It could say something like this:

“You are receiving this email because you signed up to my blog/filled out an online form on my website etc. to receive emails from me.

“I work hard to ensure I send out relevant emails to my subscribers but understand that needs and circumstances change.

“Therefore if this information is no longer relevant from you and you don’t want to hear from me then please use the “unsubscribe” link right here.”

Including something like this is good because it shows that:

  • you care about your email subscribers’ needs
  • you fully appreciate that you need their permission to contact them
  • you genuinely want to give them relevant information
  • you don’t want to waste their time if they no longer want to hear from you
  • you are totally upfront and honest about how to subscribe from your list.