Before you can communicate your message to your subscribers, you first need to think about your offer in the broadest sense. Put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes. What are their questions, concerns and needs within your market, and how can you answer them?

To find out, you can start by creating a survey to establish what your customers want to gain from your interaction. What topics interest them most? Which types of deals do they prefer? Review conversations taking place throughout social media in which consumers are talking about you or your competitors. Use the language your audience uses when you create the subject line and body of the email.

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Are you a frequent or an infrequent e-mailer?

A challenge that some of our infrequently e-mailing clients bring to us is that they often see a spike in spam reports and opt-outs when they do get around to sending an e-mail. To be clear, by infrequent e-mailers, I’m referring to a campaign every 2-3 months.

Now, the opt-outs are just an opt-out and they’re to be expected, these are savvy e-mail marketers and they know better than to take opt-outs personally, but they were troubled by the spam reports. Most of these complaints were probably spurred by the simple fact that it had been a while since the subscribers had gotten a message and they had perhaps forgotten that they had signed up in the first place.

What we suggested was a two-fold approach. First, make sure to attach an auto-responder to all their sign-up forms and to make sure that the auto-responder has information about message frequency (more info on auto-responders here). Why? Well let’s say that you email every quarter. If a subscriber signs up two days after you sent your last campaign they’ve got a nearly three month wait for the next message. In the meantime they’re likely to forget that they even signed up. An auto-responder will get to them right away and can explain to them exactly what to expect from you.

Second, if it’s been 6 months to a year since your last mailing, use a re-engagement campaign to actively weed out the subscribers who are no longer interested or who have abandoned their email address. We’ve mocked-up a re-engagement message and included it below. Notice that it’s simple and offers a clear method to unsubscribe as well as a brief description of the typical message frequency and type. The goal is to get anyone who isn’t interested to click the unsubscribe link now rather than reporting your regular campaign as spam. Additionally, we suggested that after the campaign clients use List Sweeper to remove any pending hard-bounces and ‘Mailbox Full’ type soft-bounces.

Our fake re-engagement campaign:

ReachMail is hiring! We’re a small company (under 10 people) located in the Loop that cares about our customers and employees. You won’t get stock options, free lunches (well sometimes you will) or pedicures. You will get a company that provides a good salary, excellent benefits and a chance to dive into a variety of technologies. Duties include client training, email delivery troubleshooting, product support, HTML support.

Skills include:

# Knowledge of HTML, understanding of CSS a plus
# Competency in Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and MS Office, Internet Explorer and Firefox
# Familiarity with email marketing and email clients, image editing and data manipulation
# Familiarity with programming languages?
# Knack for troubleshooting and the ability to see a task through from start to finish
# Sharp attention to detail and time management ability while multitasking
# Professional, responsive and courteous phone presence
# Cordial, patient and graceful demeanor in heated situations
# Must be an energetic “self-starter” with strong verbal, written and interpersonal skills and the ability to work independently and within a team.

Excellent, supportive work environment that includes Blue Cross PPO insurance, 401k, profit sharing, vision/dental.

Email your resume to jmurphy@reachmail.com