One of the most often overlooked opt-in email strategies is the “confirmation email”. The TailoredMail system – as a default – will send a “confirmation” email to any new subscriber who signs up to receive your content. Most send either a simple ‘thank you’ email. But there are several important considerations and strategies at play here that can dramatically improve your overall results, response and retention…Read these important tips:
Tips for a better confirmation email:
1.) Offer them something. We like to refer to it as “offering a gift”. In fact, we strongly recommend that each and every email you send provides some kind of “gift” to the recipient. Gifts can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes – and they don’t need to cost you money. Perhaps it’s a white paper, or a one-time discount offer, or a series of your own “tips”. Maybe it’s a letter from a high-ranking executive sharing their thoughts on your industry. One client of ours offers multiple white paper choices from leading industry analysts, others offer industry-specific “tips” (e.g. ’5 key strategies for securing your network’), one even delivers a home-built cartoon that muses over the latest industry ‘fad’, and yet another provides a $20-off coupon code on a future purchase.
Our studies (and others touted within the industry) show these kinds of offers dramatically increase the open rates and click-through for new subscribers in subsequent email broadcasts. This is CRITICAL, especially because of the ever-growing ‘images are turned off’ dilemma. More and more email applications and services initially ‘hide’ images from their recipients in an effort to ‘protect them’ from unwanted email (images being shown are how we know if someone opened an email).
Images-being-displayed-in-email-by-default should be a very important strategy within your email programs as they enable more reliable tracking (e.g. opens), they present your email as you intended it (when they’re turned off your email can look awkward), and they also help keep your emails out of the dreaded ‘junk folder’. How? Most email applications and services turn images “on” if, and only if your email address is in their address book. This “Personal White List” approach works under the logic that if your email address is important enough to go in their address book, then you must be a trusted source. (TailoredMail deploys a “Having trouble with images? Go here” capability that renders an identical version of the email in a web page, complete with open trackers and subscriber activity tracking).
This confirmation or thank-you email is also critical in establishing your brand identity and future recognition with the subscriber. Our studies have shown that programs without a confirmation email perform MUCH lower than those with one. Why? A confirmation email gives the subscriber instant gratification – a critical emotion within the web world. Without it, your future emails will arrive out-of-the-blue without any prior exposure to what they look like, who the “from” email address might be, and what they ‘expect’ to receive. We’ve even seen spam-complaints from highly reputable opt-in clients even though the users had subscribed 30-days prior – they simply forgot they had opted in.
2.) Show/give them a sample of what you typically send. Not only should you provide a link to see a sample of your email communications (e.g.”Go here to view a sample of our newsletter”), but several clients have great success by also SENDING them the latest newsletter as a part of their confirmation email. This is a great way to provide instant gratification. This also give you the opportunity to get the subscriber to “edit/update their preferences”. For example, you could go ahead and deliver interesting articles in multiple subject areas, and encourage the recipient to fine-tune their subscription.
TailoredMail makes it VERY simple to create/segment content into different topics of interest – and just as easily add links to the end of each article such as “remove this topic from my profile”.
3.) Reinforce to the subscriber what you captured on the sign-up page. We always recommend displaying in the confirmation email their profile information, as well as their subscription preferences and interests. This reinforces to the subscriber that you truly are treating them individually. Nothing smells more like “bulk email” when the email itself looks as if it were the same thing everyone else gets. Be sure to take advantage of your email database’s capapbilities by embedding the subscribers preferences in each email (preferably in the footer).
4.) Be sure to monitor your “replies” at least once a week. With a good confirmation email you will potentially get some subscribers “responding” by hitting the reply-to button. To that end, we see clients get a lot of feedback and dialogue with their subscribers by simply putting a big, fat, “Give Feedback” button at the top of their email.
We hope these tips and ideas surrounding the sign-up/confirmation-email portion of your email programs come in handy, and offer you improved results.
