Email Growth and Retention: Data-Based Tips To Keep Subscribers Happy

Research has identified why consumers are willing to subscribe to email products. Heres a deep dive into the behavior and motivation behind satisfying subscriber desire.

Source: Bigstock

Sure, the fans of social media are legion. Of course, brand-based websites exist for good reasons. And there’s no question that snail mail has its advantages. But when you ask consumers how they want companies to contact them, the method that they prefer is email. In a poll conducted in 2015 by MarketingSherpa, over 2,000 consumers gave their preference:

(Source: MarketingSherpa)

Three out of five consumers prefer to hear from companies via email. That’s for companies who are selling stuff — my bet would be that a much higher percentage are willing to open email from non-profit brands they support and media brands they rely on.

“What, email?” you scoff. “Email is old and out and very unsexy. Nobody cares about email.” Well, listen to the founder of a new, hot, and successful email newsletter, Carly Zakin of theSkimm, from a Business Insider interview last month:

  • When we started theSkimm, we started meeting with investors, industry experts, and everyone was like, email is dead – this is a really bad idea. But they would email that to us.

    And we would just laugh at it because we’re like, you’re saying email is dead, but you’re emailing that to us. And we both still read email every single morning. Obviously, since then, we’ve seen a resurgence of email newsletters, and a lot of that, we’ve been told, is credited to what we’ve done.

That’s just an anecdote, but the data backs her up. Email penetration remains remarkably high, and is still rising:

(Source: eMarketer via Statista)

Nine-tenths of Internet users and three-fourths of all Americans have email. That’s a powerful reality to marketers, and they are putting more and more ad dollars into email:

(Source: eMarketer via Statista)

Clearly, there is no need to feel defensive, email fans. Rather, turn your attention to the ways to keep email list subscribers happy — by giving them the email they want. Researchers have produced data on just that. Take a look at what subscribers want:

(Source: Constant Contact via Statista)

Each of the topics in the rest of this column looks at one of these reasons in depth.

EVERYONE LOVES DEALS

Consumers tolerate, accept, and even sometimes love to get email from favorite companies because they love discounts and special offers. Most Americans are eager to take advantage of discounts and special offers of all kinds:

(Source: Statista Survey, Subscription Insider)

For marketing email, this may well be the heart of your communication with consumers. The biggest value you may be able to give is the chance to save money. And even brands that do not have as mercantile a relationship with subscribers — email used for advocacy, say, or information — may well benefit from offering subscribers the occasional deal.

THE PAYOFF IS WORTH THE PRICE

A common tactic used by marketers is to “sell” something special for the price of one’s email address. If you want the white paper or the discount code or the free sample, you have to agree to subscribe to the email. In order to take part in the special promotion, the user is willing to part with an email address. In this case, the immediate value of the thing you get has greater value to the subscriber than the subscription itself.

So yes, you can “bribe” potential subscribers with goodies of one kind or another. For example, here are 10 Powerful Opt-In Incentives That Will Get You More Email Subscribers. And here are 9 Irresistible Incentives That’ll Grow Your Email List Like Crazy.

The danger, it seems to me, is that if you are paying your users a goodie to subscribe, what happens after they get the goodie? Will they ever open the subsequent email you send them? At its best, a specific promotion is a foot in the door, a chance to sell the user on your email subscription. And this is not an audience who wants your email; it’s an audience that wanted something else, and now your job is to convince them to keep opening and clicking. I’d like to see some data on churn rate for subscribers who were offered a specific promotional incentive vs. those who were only offered the email subscription itself.

READERS WANT INFORMATION

After television, email comes in second when ranked for reach on a daily basis — TV has a reported reach of 75.7%, with email at 62.5%:

(Source: GfK via Statista)

And that’s data released by the Television Bureau of Advertising, so give as much weight to the TV datum as you will.

Either way, email as a news source is a significant factor for many subscribers. In emergencies, 15% of people use email for news. In general, 15% of consumers seeking online news get it through email. And considering that most news-oriented email sends readers through a link to a website, the importance of email as a news gateway is significant:

(Source: Pew Research via Statista)

Of course, email that is informative goes way beyond breaking news in the traditional sense. Email can entertain, educate, and illuminate. Writing at Pardot, Lautel Okhio has some insight on this:

  • You want the content you send to add real value. Whether it’s mind-blowing statistics about your industry or a series of funny videos starring your company’s mascot llama, show your subscribers that you’re genuinely trying to provide them with content that they’ll find useful or entertaining as opposed to random sales pitches. I once received an email asking me if I’d like to receive a curated newsletter of each month’s new demos and how-to videos. I had been subscribed to the email list for a few weeks and had been primarily watching the demos and how-to videos that were sent out. I signed up. Tracking what types of content your recipients engage with is the first step to sending them content that will resonate.

EVERYONE LOVES TO FEEL SPECIAL

Email subscribers are already in a select group: They have signed up to get the email; they have actually clicked to open it. These consumers know that there are plenty of people who have NOT done those things. The very essence of email subscription is to create the in-group of readers and the out-group of those who are not. The power of that division, in this age of partisanship, is to reinforce the special value of being an insider by offering insiders deals unavailable to the out-group. Exclusive content offered only to email subscribers has the power to motivate.

In a discussion of working with partners to create special promotions, Corey Wainwright at HubSpot discusses this point:

  • You could even work out a deal with partners in which your services are discounted exclusively for their audience — just be sure that value is clearly communicated in the email — to give their list a sense of VIP status. Making people feel like they’re getting the insider deal in this way is another fantastic way to not only generate new leads and revenue but also make your partner look great as a provider of these types of VIP hookups.

One way to foster that sense of exclusivity around specific promotions is to build loyalty through personal links with subscribers. Used correctly, personalization has power in connecting. Email and marketing services provider Experien conducted some research on that, and as RetailDrive’s Dan O’Shea reports, the results are striking:

  • Personalizing email subject lines, for example, can be highly effective. Experian said that between April 2015 and March 2016, brands that included personalized subject lines experienced 27% higher unique click rates, 11% higher click-to-open rates and more than double the transaction rate compared with other promotional mailings.

TRUE BELIEVERS LIKE EMAIL

A huge role for email is to forge personal connections with both brands and causes that subscribers support. Building loyalty, as above, is important, but that has to be loyalty TO something. Brands can have loyal followers, as we have seen with Apple, Starbucks, and others.

Nonprofits understand the power of email to connect personally with loyal supporters. Look at this poll of nonprofit organizations:

(Source: Constant Contact via Statista)

Nonprofits use email at better-than-average engagement rates. I have conflicting data for open rates in general. Here’s a source (Epsilon, 2017) that has average open rates around 32% to 34%, and click-through rates around 3.0% to 3.5%. Here’s another (Statista, 2015) with open rates in the 25% range. And here’s another (MailerMailer, 2016) with rates that top out at 22% to 23% and then drop down to 5%, based on industry.

With that in mind, look at this blog post by a nonprofit, Jake Brewer at the Sunlight Foundation:

  • Now, emails such as these are a big part of our job to engage the public here at Sunlight, and we’re generally thought to have a quite successful email program by any standard metrics. Typically, in an email to 40-50,000 people, our open rates are between 30-35% and click throughs are around 7-10%. Sometimes much higher in exceptional cases (we’ve had open rates in excess of 100% when an email “goes viral”), but these are typical numbers and they’re well “above average” for those who think about such things. I have a confession to make, though. I really don’t like email that much. I see 30% open rate and think “70% delete rate.” I see 8% click through, and think… “oh jeez.”

I won’t comment on whether Brewer should be happy or unhappy with his “70% delete rate” and his 8% to 10% click through. But I think it is pretty obvious that most brands seeking to connect to subscribers would kill for those numbers.

The advantage is vast for a cause or a brand or a company that people believe in and identify with. That said, what do subscribers want from the causes they prefer? Here’s some research on that:

Source: Bigstock

0)](Source: Achieve; Johnson, Grossnickle and Associates via Statista)

If I may offer some advice to the Jake Brewers of the world — don’t worry so much about your open rates and your click throughs. Rather, use your email reach, your wide and engaging outreach to your loyal subscribers, to offer them news about your cause, about events, about opportunities and how their donations are spent. The metrics will follow.

And for the larger base of marketers, do the same! Look for ways to offer your subscribers more of the content that connects them to you.

Insider Take:

Email users seek value in the forms of deals, incentives, information, exclusive content, and the chance to connect to a cause or brand they support. Email producers need to keep these factors in mind as they seek to satisfy their subscribers.

In my next column, I’m going to tackle this issue from the other direction. Instead of looking at the things subscribers want, I’ll look at the factors that make them quit.

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