Ashley Hill — April 18, 2020 
It’s a lot of work to carefully curate and keep your email and contact lists. Building contact lists and driving new leads to your website is its own science, and getting those people to enlist to be part of your contact list is like alchemy, turning leads into subscriber gold.
So once you get clients and leads to sign up for emails, how can you stay in touch and keep your brand at the forefront of their minds?
Sure, it can be easy to send out any sort of email just to send it. But too many emails or emails that aren’t worthwhile to your recipients can result in a surge of contacts clicking the unsubscribe button.
A respectable unsubscribe rate is somewhere around .5 percent. Any higher, and perhaps it’s time to examine how you are reaching out to your contact list.
It’s important to find genuine ways to reach out to your contacts and keep them informed and interested in what your company is doing. The best way to do this? Provide them with valuable information that is relevant to their needs.
Let’s take a look at a few ways you can keep in touch without the fear of someone hitting “unsubscribe.”
1. Keep Your Contacts Updated on What’s Going On
If your company is taking strides forward, that’s the kind of information you should be sharing with your contacts in any way you can! If you have a new or updated brand offering, you also have a great opportunity to reach out to your contact lists and let them know.
A cool example of this? Uber recently sent out emails informing their contacts that they now can sync their Uber schedule with their calendar. Their subject line was brief, informative and designed to appeal to their busy clientele, and their email was captivating, with a clear CTA engineered for click-throughs to get subscribers to try this new feature.
The key point here? Not only was this email informative to let email subscribers know about Uber’s new capabilities, but it was highly user-centric, being geared towards their needs, and also very easy to employ.
2. Share an Important Anecdote
Another way to reach out to customers is to share with them a major accomplishment or anecdote about your company. Chances are, this information will be both relevant and interesting to your audience, and sharing your story is a great way to reach out to them without seeming disingenuous or like you’re trying too hard.
Brooks, the running shoe and athletic gear company did just this when their sponsored athlete, Desiree Linden, won the women’s 2018 Boston Marathon while representing their brand. What better way for Brooks to reach out to their contacts (some of whom even may have participated in the race themselves) than to congratulate Linden on her run and spread the good news to the avid runners on their contact lists.
And that email they sent out? It also included a link for recipients to check out a full list of Linden’s go-to gear, working to keep readers clicking, reading and hopefully buying. They sent an email to help their contacts become just like the “greats” of running.
3. Send a Birthday Wish
If in getting contacts to join your email list you also gather their birthday information, you can send out emails with your well-wishes and perhaps even a basic promotional deal to help your contacts celebrate. It’s a win-win for you: You show your contacts that you care, and you get them thinking about your products and your brand.
A birthday wish is a perfect way to reach out, connect and remind your email subscribers about what your company does best.
Another way to accomplish this same thing, without having to ask your subscribers for additional information, is to send them a similar email on the anniversary of their subscription date. You either already have this data or chances are it will be easy to procure.
Why not stay in touch with your contacts by sending an email thanking them for subscribing and reading for a year? This is a perfect chance to remind them of why they subscribed, thank them for their subscription and invite them back to check out some new features on your site.
4. Re-engage with Subscribers
Dropbox found a fun, creative way to reach out to users who haven’t opened or saved to their Dropbox accounts in a while. By drafting an email that paired a cute graphic with a brief, simple message inviting them to use their account again, they effectively reminded their users of their presence.
When re-engaging with your subscribers, you want to keep it quick—just a note to remind them of what you can do for them. Too long or too needy of an email can come across as desperate and not user-focused. Your subscribers are busy, so keep your email brief, try not to intrude and remind your subscribers about your brand’s presence.
When you do this, you let them know how you might be able to help make their lives easier, and who doesn’t love that?
5. Holiday Promotions
You don’t just have to send out email campaigns around Christmas. Keep in touch with your contact lists around Mother’s Day or the Fourth of July with emails focused around the holiday.
Sure, you can send Christmas greetings, but think about your own inbox at that time of year: overflowing with promotions and offers from all sorts of vendors and companies. Chances are slim, however, that there are quite as many Halloween or Labor Day emails being sent.
What should you include in a holiday email? If you have promotions happening at that time, a holiday email is a great time to let your contacts know about a sale or a discount. But it’s also a great time to create a sense of urgency related to the holiday or the season.
If you run a lawn-care business, for example, you might find that Memorial Day is a great time to reach out to subscribers and let them know that you are there to help with their summer landscaping needs. Or Labor Day is a great time to remind families about online tutoring services or software. How can your email solve their problem?
Constant Contact has come up with a great list of ways to connect with your contact list. Check out a few more holiday-related email marketing campaigns here.
6. Weekly or Monthly Newsletters
You can reach out to all of your subscribers weekly or even monthly if you know how to do it right.
Sending an email just for the sake of sending an email won’t help anyone; your subscribers won’t read it, and it will cost you and your team precious time. But many companies have perfected the newsletter, and you can be one of them.
How do you achieve this? Keep it short, and keep it relevant to your readers.
What should you include in your weekly (or even monthly) newsletters? Try a few of these ideas:
- A round-up of your best blog content or interesting blog content from companies you partner with—as long as it’s helpful information to share with clients and contacts
- Weekly helpful hints or weekly user-friendly content (a great example of this is Cook Smart’s Weekly Eats email series, which is thoughtfully divided into sections and easily shareable with friends and family)
- A message from your CEO about how your brand is working to make your customers’ lives easier or working to solve a particular problem
- A spotlight on a customer or employee and how they interact with your brand or products
- Recent articles about your company or recent awards or accolades
- A guest post you’ve written for another blog
- A survey or poll
- An infographic (which can increase web traffic by 12 percent)
The key with these newsletters? Find ways to make them relevant to the recipient.
Sure, letting them know about an award your company has received sounds good to you. But why does it matter to them? Don’t forget to circle everything back to why your subscribers would want to know this information and why it’s helpful for you to share it with them.
7. “Recommended for You” Emails
Personalization in email marketing campaigns is a new trend that you can’t ignore. Why? Because it has the data to back it up.
Ninety-four percent of companies say that personalization is critical to their current and future success, but 60 percent of these same companies say they struggle to find ways to personalize.
Sure, including your contact’s name in the subject line works, but what else can you do?
If you have the detailed data to back it up, sending a “recommended for you” email will definitely pop in your subscribers’ inboxes. We desire personalized attention, so when emails are tailored specifically for us, we pay attention. And when you send these personalized recommendations to your subscribers, they feel like you care about their preferences and their needs, and they become more attached to your brand.
Help your subscribers discover the other awesome content or products available on your site with a “recommended for you” email. You can start to employ your bucketing and email list segmentation effectively here to really personalize your recommendations.
The main theme with each of these suggestions for your next email marketing campaign? Make it all about your reader.
Your email should stand out in their inbox and draw them in. If you want your contacts to open your email, don’t forget the most important thing: Your email should be all about them.
Remember how we talked about developing contact lists being like turning leads into gold? That’s the secret to this alchemy: staying focused on your subscribers.
Once you do that, finding ways to stay in touch is easy!
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