You might be wondering how puppies fit into this article. Don’t worry, we’ll get there.
If you’re a marketer, you know how critical your email subscribers can be to turning leads into clients, and increasing the lifetime value of your customers. A successfully and carefully managed email list can sustain a business and help scale growth by continuing to retarget previous customers through email, a channel that can be leveraged for far less cost than paid advertising if done properly. Given the fact that you’ve got purchase, demographic, and behavior data of your subscribers, the messaging can be much more personalized and relevant for an email channel than it often can be for paid advertising.
Capturing opt-ins and subscribers is a well documented challenge. Conversion rate optimization (CRO as it’s often referred to) is often looked at as the key factor to building an email list, as these lists are often built on acquiring subscribers through forms on your website. There are numerous guides to laying out a page to drive more email subscribers, and a simple google search will give you countless “X Tips to Increase Your Email Subscribers”. Some of which can be useful, others are simply fluff written by ‘gurus’ and ‘growth hackers’.
What’s glossed over in just about all of the advice out there is perhaps the most critical point to actually turn those emails into engaged subscribers. If you collect an email address, you want to be confident that you can actually leverage them to increase your future sales or conversions – and doing so starts right away.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
In the competitive digital marketing landscape, that first impression is critical, and email is no exception. Consumers are hammered with marketing emails all day. The average person is likely signed up for dozens of newsletters, and is probably getting more marketing emails than personal or work related email on a daily basis.
If your inbox or promotions tab is anything like mine, you’ve got a litany of marketing emails, promos, and newsletters sitting there unopened, that you have no conviction to open for any reason other than not having unread emails at the end of the day.
When someone goes out of their way to sign up for your newsletter or email updates, the first impression you make is absolutely critical in their willingness to ever open another email from your brand again. Too many organizations make the mistake of going through the effort of getting email signups, and the first email the subscriber receives is a lackluster, generic, “Thanks for Signing Up” email. In many cases, a subscriber may opt in and not receive anything until weeks later, and be lumped into generic newsletter audiences.
When this happens, the subscriber has effectively been told “Thank you for giving us your data, we’re going to spam you with generic content once a week (or more)” and they’ve immediately begun seeing that emails from that organization are of little to no value to them.
Too often, new email subscribers are lumped into groups that have contacts further along in the buyer or customer journey, or are too quickly sold on other products without receiving a fair offer in return from the organization. A significant portion of the effort made to capture an email subscriber has gone completely to waste.
On the other hand, if someone signs up to receive email updates from you, and they’re immediately met with an introductory coupon code, or a welcome series that answers their immediate questions and points them in the proper direction during their onboarding of your platform, you’ve trained them to associate your emails with a good experience.
Now, back to the puppies.
If you’ve ever trained a puppy, you know it didn’t take long to like putting on the leash, because they learned through conditioning that it’s usually followed by a trip outside for a walk. With our email subscribers, we want them to associate future email notifications from our brand with the possibility of a good offer, or relevant positive experience. Our goal should be to get our email subscribers excited for our emails in the same way a puppy gets excited for a walk when the leash comes out. The leash is not a means of control and getting the puppy to do what we want, but rather that it’s an indication something good is about to happen.
See the parallel?
When we create newsletter confirmation emails or welcome series for clients, we aren’t doing it to acknowledge that we’ve collected their data, we’re doing it because we are providing the immediate value back and giving them the proper perception that emails that come from our clients are useful, timely, and relevant to their needs.
When you create a good first impression to your subscribers, you’ll have much higher engagement from them down the road and buy yourself significant good faith from your subscribers for the foreseeable future.
Need help getting more value out of your email marketing efforts? Want to talk more about puppies and excuses to bring them up in marketing discussions?