As an e-mail marketer, your No. 1 priority should always be to build trust-based relationships with your customers. Rather than intimidating customers with relentless and intrusive e-mail blasts, marketers need to ensure that their subscription email processes and services meet their customers’ expectations on multiple levels.
First, in order to gain your customers’ trust, you must ask for permission and be transparent about how you intend to use their data. Be honest and clear about your privacy policy and reassure customers that you won’t do something inappropriate with the data entrusted to you. Of course, marketers also need to respect their right of choice by providing the option to easily opt in or out and change their profile preference.
Second, remember that needs and preferences change so never assume that permission is evergreen. Your aim is to ensure that the value customers see in their subscription remains as strong as it was on the day they signed up. So you’ll want to continually monitor your engagement metrics, like clicks, and implement surveys and other strategies to tune your content to what customers want today.
Lastly, with virtually everyone now utilizing multiple channels of communication (e-mail, SMS, IM, RSS feeds, social networks), relevance is no longer defined just in terms of content. If your customers express preference for a particular format or frequency, your goal should be to find a way to honor their requests. Many companies have lagged behind in their ability to deliver digital messages through multiple channels, but being able to do so in an efficient, holistic way is where things are trending. The future is all about providing choice to customers. And the answer lies in finding a message management platform that enables you to keep pace with changing communication behaviors, and to ultimately deliver on the old direct marketing mantra of right message, right time, right place.
Properly managing subscriptions can be a vital part of creating the brand identity and customer loyalty that pay bottom line dividends. Your keys to success are in offering transparency, value, and choice, and in finding the technology solutions that enable you to do so.
