Content Dethroned As King?

Content has been dethroned as king and relevant content has taken its place.

Of course relevant content is king. What else would it be? Off-topic content?

The question is: Do you know what is relevant to your audience? Do you know what is relevant to each of your audiences? Do you provide a range of content that appeals to more than one segment at a time? If not, read on for tips on how to improve your email subscriber retention and how to improve email response rates.

Examples:

Retail
A retail furniture store features only what is on sale for three mailings, which, coincidentally, is all bedroom furniture. How many people are in the market for bedroom furniture at the time of each mailing? Pushing what is on sale is fine but feature items in other rooms as well. Fewer subscribers will feel they got yet another email that doesn’t apply to them.

Professional Services
A professional services firm features content that helps prospects understand their services and choose them. What about prospects further along in a project and have started implementation? What content do they want to see? What are the other phases of the prospect’s project? The professional services firm is missing an opportunity to demonstrate their expertise and communicate key differentiators in the other phases of a project.

You get the idea. Step back and put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes. Even the Pros lose sight of this from time to time. Whoops. I’ve forgotten to update or reference my editorial calendar. Or worse. I settled for what content I could get versus going the extra mile to get what will be effective.

Everything we do online should contribute to building our house list. Everything we do with our house list should be done to retain our current subscribers and acquiring new ones. Don’t blow it on the last step and come up short.

Until you get your content game on, consider breaking out your lists into sub categories so you don’t lose people to the dreaded global unsubscribe.

Examples:

Retail
Instead of the retail furniture store offering a single newsletter or promotional list, they could offer the subscriber the option to customize their subscription preferences. E.g. Receive promotions and offers by room type, furniture type, accessories, etc.

Professional Services
In this scenario, they could offer subscription preferences for a newsletter, white paper announcements, case studies announcements, etc.

You can see where this is going. You can reduce the number of subscribers who globally unsubscribe by offering other subscription options. If they don’t want your newsletter because it rarely addresses their needs, they still have the option to subscribe to something else instead of Globally Unsubscribing.

I hope that these tips will help you with your email subscriber retention efforts.

Download this as a presentation.

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2. 6 Easy Steps To Implement An Email Segmentation Strategy
3. Recipients Are Only Good For One Click.
4. Dedicated Landing Pages: The Other 50 Percent of your Email Marketing Campaign