Build a relationship with your audience to add value. You have to invest in your relationship first and then the readers will follow.
Money is in the list is a known secret to almost every blogger and so most of the new bloggers work really hard to get people to subscribed to their list. It is not the count in the list that matters but what matters is how active your list readers are. If you don’t interact with your readers, slowly but surely they become stale.
So let me share with you what’s the ideal way of keeping your readers and may be potential customers to remain active and interested.
1. Follow Up
User subscribes by giving an email does mean they want more information from you and if you don’t follow up, sooner or later they may loose interest in reading what you may follow up.
The flip side of it is if you just follow up with too many emails, users may think they are being bombarded with too much information and may just stop receiving emails from you.
So try to maintain a balance of what user expects and what is being delivered. Try to be consistent with follow-ups and by consistent I don’t mean daily email but a schedule of when user can expect an email. You may not follow up daily if you have nothing special to be in the email but once every month may not be right schedule either. So may be weekly or twice a week is something that may not be a bad idea.
2. Build Humanly Relationship
If you want to build a relationship with your audience, they need to be interacting with a human being and not a bot; don’t just email from noreply type of email. I always use my personal email address to send all my emails from both my blogs and each of my email has the message that they can reply to the same email to interact with me.
Using my personal email has dual advantage of which is when users not only feel personal about my emails but as they reply to my emails, my email is added to their contact list and so future emails from me are by default from a person in the contact list and more often than not they are delivered in their inbox.
When you interact with your readers, you build a relationship with them and can easily find pain points which when identified can help you build products and solutions for them. It’s a perfect to be able to find what your users want and still have not been able to find a solution for themselves.
3. Celebrate Holidays With Cards and Wishes
Are you running out of ideas to interact with your subscribers? Holidays and wishes are great ways to interact with your readers. Just a one line to your subscriber can take activity of the subscribers long way forward. You don’t need any sales offer not even link to your site. Just plain email wishing them.
I treat each of my subscribers as friend. You always wish your friend on occasions you can wish; right? So do I.
In the email its just one line to wishing them Eid Mubarak or Independence Day (My Investment Analysis Blog is Indian GEO targeted). It generates more response than any other email I send over.
Holidays and events you celebrate can be a great way to wish readers and interact with them. It not only helps in building activity with your readers but also creates humanly interactions and building trust.
Interact with them as and when you can like thanking them when they join your list, congratulate them on achieving something good.
4. Interact at the Right Time
Interacting at the best possible time means readers have more time to grab your content as well as reply to your emails.
After Sending almost 500,000+ emails, I have seen that emails on weekdays especially Monday and before 9AM in the morning for my Investment Analysis Blog has the most interactions with me and emails in late afternoon and on weekends has the least. It could be because we start our day and week going through the emails we have and though my email being one among the hundreds of emails they have received, it is still the best time to read more stuff online before getting started for job or work.
So the schedule I prefer is emailing every Monday morning my latest blog posts and then on Wednesday Evening to only those who could not view or read my email on Monday.
You have to keep testing when is the right time to be sending your emails and then create a schedule of your emails accordingly.
5. Add Value
Last but by no means the least is each interaction with your subscriber should add value and connects with your reader. Trying to disguise helpful tips as sales letters does not work and adds no real value. If you want your readers to be eagerly anticipating your emails, you need to add real value to your emails. If you don’t add value, slowly over time the readers will loose interest.
Conclusion
If you have to sum up everything in one line then it would be. Build a relationship with your audience to add value. You have to invest in your relationship first and then the readers will follow.
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