Eco-friendly email marketing: a complete guide on how to sell through mailing lists and not annoy users

Email marketing is an effective tool for promoting the company's products, which helps to get additional sales with minimal costs, increase customer loyalty and make communication with them more productive. The main thing is to be able to competently build an email strategy.

If your mailing list is a faceless and annoying set of emails, users will complain about spam more often, and in most cases this is the point of no return: the mail service will begin to understand that your mailing list annoys users, and will automatically send all emails from your address to spam. This is guaranteed to reduce the results of email promotion to zero.

A large base is not a guarantee of success. It is important to work on the quality of the mailing list audience — it makes no sense to have more than 10,000 subscribers in the database if 500 people open emails.

The audience should consist only of those people who got there at will. Otherwise, users will ignore messages or send them to spam — and this, in addition to sanctions from the mail service, will lead to a deterioration in statistics and overpayments for the service.

Here are three tips that will help to avoid such consequences and gather a base of the most interested subscribers:

• Forget about ready-made databases;
• Do not promise in the subscription form what you cannot give to the user in the newsletter;
• Use lead magnets to trigger users to subscribe, but leave them the right to refuse to receive emails.

Purchase databases consist of non-target users who have never heard of your company or who are simply not interested in it. Such people are more likely to delete or send spam emails, thereby increasing your chances of being blacklisted by the mail service.

Even if after that you collect a new high-quality database, you will have to spend a lot of resources so that the letters start reaching users again.

It's better to work on collecting a quality audience right away:

• Assemble the database yourself: add to it only registered users and those who wanted to subscribe themselves.
• Set up Double Opt-in — additional confirmation of the email address. With this mechanism, you will not allow bots and inactive email addresses to get into the database.

If you promise users that by subscribing, they will be the first to learn about discounts and promotions, and in the end you send them digests with company news and assortment updates — do not be surprised that after 2-3 letters they will begin to unsubscribe from you.

If you want to maintain a trusting relationship with the buyer, honestly explain in the subscription form what notifications you will send him. Tell us about the content of the mailing list, bonuses and the frequency of sending emails. You can even attach an example letter.

Giving useful materials is a good tactic, but you should not force the user to subscribe. If a person is not interested in your content, then he will simply take the gift and will no longer open letters from you. Always leave a choice — give people the opportunity to pick up a gift without a subscription.

For example, on the website of your business, you can offer a notebook with useful articles and checklists. To get it, you need to enter an email address. At this stage, the user can immediately subscribe to your newsletter or opt out of it — just uncheck the subscription offer.

This approach allows you to:

• Increase user loyalty. It is much more pleasant to receive gifts just like that, and not for performing certain actions.
• Increase the base of target subscribers. Even if the user is not ready to subscribe to the newsletter right away, he may well decide to do so after studying our notebook — in this case, his subscription will already be conscious, and not forced.

It is unlikely that all your subscribers are equally interested in the same topics, especially if you own a store with tens of thousands of products of different categories. You can, of course, alternate topics — today send the entire database a selection of goods for hunting, and in 3 days — for fishing. But it is more effective to do it differently — immediately divide the base into hunters and fishermen and send them different letters.

Segmentation happens:

• Explicit — when the user himself notes at the registration stage what he wants to receive letters about. These can be certain groups of products or information guides (news, promotions, events).
• Hidden is a more effective but complicated option when you independently analyze your database and choose which audience you will send some letters to, and which one will send others.

When you are just starting to gain a base, use explicit segmentation: form several mailing categories and offer users a choice from them. During this period, you need to carefully monitor the reaction of subscribers to existing mailings — this data can be used after you gain a sufficiently large database.

When your audience is ≥ 10,000 subscribers, enable hidden segmentation: start dividing categories into narrower and more precise segments in order to deliver the most relevant content to the audience.

Even such a basic technique as adding a user name to the mailing list gives good results. We conducted a test in which we checked the impact of addressing by name in the mailing list on the indicators: one part of the audience was sent a letter in which the name was indicated in the subject and body of the letter, and the second — without a name at all. The percentage of open emails in the first group increased by 5%, and the clickability increased by 68%.

You can go even further — add dynamic blocks to the letter that adapt to the user: substitute products from his basket, offer items from the list of recently viewed or recommend something that the client may like, and so on.

Trigger emails relate directly to the user — they write about the person and his specific actions on the site. Trigger ones include, for example: greetings after subscribing; birthday greetings; reminders of goods thrown in the basket; the offer of related items.

Through the text of the letter, the user should understand that you do not want to quickly sell him the goods, but ethically help with the choice. For example, when you automatically subscribe a user to the newsletter after registration, do not just thank him, but explain what you are offering. Don't forget to mention how you can unsubscribe from the mailing list if the user is not interested. Thanks to this approach, a person will not be unpleasantly surprised to find letters from you in his mail.

Do not forget to exclude from the selection of products that are bought once and for a long time, for example, a lawn mower — most likely, this thing is no longer needed by the user. This way you will free up space in the mailing list for more relevant products. When analyzing the results, remember — users do not always buy directly from the mailing list.

Often their path to conversion is much more difficult. For example, if a user receives an email from a sporting goods store with a guide "How to do sports at home", his conversion into a buyer can go like this:

• He reads, but does not buy any goods — there is no need for him to do this now.
• After a while, he realizes that he needs dumbbells for home workouts. Starts looking for where to buy them.
• Remembers about our letter and our store → makes a purchase from us directly through the website.