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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.
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
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
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
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.
Travis Hazlewood is a writer and expert in email deliverability with 4+ years of multi-platform deliverability experience. His focus over that time has been wide-ranging, from global-platform reliability to one-off spam-filtering issues for senders. He has regularly written blogs and co-authored an ebook, which consistently focuses on humanizing a very technical and theoretical field. His passion is in educating and strengthening senders in the email space to earn high engagements by following best practices that honor and respect subscribers as people.
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