How To Attract (and Keep!) the Subscribers You DO Want

Last month, we talked about the email subscribers you don’t want and how to prevent them from signing up to your list. Now, it’s time to think about how to get and keep the subscribers you DO want.

To help us with this, we talked to Johhn Four from Gamer Lifestyle. He left some impressive comments about how to prevent zombie addresses, so we took a look at the site’s email campaign. The results were so good, we decided we needed to share his email marketing strategy.

Find out what you need to do to get the right visitors’ attention and how to keep subscribers tuned in to your list.

Use Confirmed Opt-in

“When I switched my account to AWeber I asked all my subscribers to re-opt-in via AWeber. That was scary. About 36% signed up immediately. I got to about 51% over the next month as people got around to reading email. Then more signups as people realized my newsletter stopped arriving.
All told, I’m at about 60% of my original subscriber base, but my list is now more engaged and responsive, I get fewer spam complaints and a lot fewer bounces.”

The only way you’re going to know if you have someone’s real email address is if you ask them to confirm. This means they need to know the login and password for that address and go in and interact with your email.

Not requiring confirmation puts you in a vulnerable position; you open your list up to email addresses people don’t check which can clog up your list and hurt your deliverability.

Provide an Incentive

Incentives can be highly effective, but if not used with caution, can also cause problems. They do a great job attracting visitors to sign up to receive the incentive you’re offering, but if you don’t explain why they should provide a valid email address they check regularly, they may just cough up the address they use to get incentives, or unsubscribe right away.

Here’s Johnn’s advice:

“Offer a downloadable signup incentive but deliver it only by email (not on the thank you page). Then send another email immediately that advises of upcoming valuable offerings.

For example, I zip up archives of past issues for download and offer the link a couple times a year.”

The Gamer Lifestyle welcome message delivers the incentive he promises and keeps subscribers excited for more:

Keep Them Interested

All the zombie flicks out there have taught us that even good people can turn bad. If you’re not keeping up the quality content, subscribers can tune out.

So how does Gamer Lifestyle handle this? He uses past freebies that were part of old incentives, and recycles them in his follow up series. He also continues to provide free ebooks and other helpful information.

You can see how his messages continue to deliver cool content in this message with a new ebook:

And this message contains an interview with an industry expert:

The results show they’re doing a great job: Gamer Lifestyle is averaging an open rate of about 60%, with 30% of those also bringing in clicks.

How Do Your Stats Compare?

There’s always room for improvement with any campaign. Try using one of Gamer Lifestyle’s tips for your own email marketing campaign and see what results you get.

Getting good results with different methods? Tell us about them!

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Education Marketing Associate (Crystal Gouldey Moore) on Google

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