At the heart of it, retention is about retaining attention.

Keeping your product top-of-mind as the go-to solution to a particular problem is the ultimate goal. It requires marketing techniques that make product use habitual.

It’s no wonder such strategies are so impactful. 

Email has been an important channel for retention for a long time now, and that is because both email deliverability and customer retention rely on regular, consistent engagement.

Email traffic that creates a habit with its subscribers of consistency and engagement becomes the reputational backbone of a sender's email reputation, empowering their efforts across all fronts with strong reputation signals.

The ideal retention strategy, then, utilizes email to consistently and proactively meet a consumer’s needs while staying top of mind for any unexpected needs to come in the future.

Thankfully, many of the pieces to do this can be set up in a low-touch capacity to make your email marketing efforts top-of-mind with low effort.

Set expectations up right at the beginning

All of this starts by starting the relationship right.

You do this by setting up proper expectations at the beginning for what the rest of your relationship will look like moving forward.

What types of email elements are important at the top of your funnel right after opt-in?

Recognizability in the mailbox

• Make sure your sending info (Header From) in every email is recognizable with the organization/expected content

• Make sure your sending domain/subdomain is authenticated

• Make sure Subject Lines/Pre-Header Texts always work together to create intrigue while also being clear on the content topic

Immediate communication

• Set up a Welcome flow that confirms the action of the subscriber and creates expectations for the content being opted in to

• Set up transactional flows for other business-related activities on the recipient’s part (whitepaper downloads, receipts, password changes, etc.)

Establish frequency expectations

• Set up an onboarding nurture of informational content to follow the Welcome flow, preferably as an automation

• Communicate clearly at the beginning of all nurtures the expected frequency and opportunities for preference updates

Retain relevance with personalized content

As you move past the more onboarding-focused content and move into more ongoing promotional spaces, retention practices must be kept in mind to help promotional content succeed without causing burnout.

Provide consistent up-to-date informational content

• Weekly/monthly newsletters can train subscribers to trust you as a SME/news-resource to rely on

• Monthly product update emails can help elevate new products/features and encourage fresh excitement in your audience for the product

• Other consistent and helpful content types that are relevant to your audience base and their interests can help maintain a relationship of fulfilled expectation 

Tempt them with new content opportunities

• Occasionally include a preview of other content types they are missing out on and give them the option to opt into them

  • Ideally, this would be in the form of a content block advertising within the currently opted-in content

    • I.e. A newsletter blurb in the Product Updates email, an onboarding email showcasing various content types available, etc.

  • Never auto-opt in subscribers across content that has not been explicitly opted in to

Personalize bulk promotions

• Create dynamic content blocks to elevate the most relevant parts of content based on common interest points

• Create dynamic CTAs to encourage conversion based on personalized interest points

Maintain the relationship with automations

Relationships take hard work. They take clear communication and regular check-ins to make sure expectations are being met.

With email, you should do this as well, and even better if you do it with automations.

Give them a break

• Create filters and tags that identify subscribers seeing a large gap in engagement and temporarily suppress them from particular sends to help resolve burnout with longer breaks between sends

  • I.e. 3-month unengaged subscribers only receive every other week’s email instead of the usual weekly email

• Create a link or preference option that allows subscribers to snooze email contact for a limited time

Build lifecycle check-ins

• Re-engage with subscribers with relevant interests on key dates since the last engagement

• Proactively reach out and encourage subscribers to update their traffic preferences

Utilize a sunset process

• Proactively sunset long-term unengaged subscribers who go more than a year ignoring your emails

Where retention makes email easier

Let’s be honest, marketers are already juggling a thousand other things, so email marketing becoming more complicated is not desirable.

Thankfully, as shown above, many of the best practice tactics here can be automated or established in templated settings for future campaigns. Plus, they make the efforts around email marketing easier in other ways.

Honoring subscribers’ interests, preemptively engaging their preferences, and maintaining a relationship of positive engagement across your audience will build a habit of positive engagement that not only earns you more business but also helps your emails consistently reach the inbox.

That’s a win-win in my book.