Best Practices: How Does Your Subscriber Garden Grow?

By Susan Brown Faghani
Manager, Marketing and Sales Communication, L-Soft

Spring is here, at least in the northern hemisphere – a season of renewal and connection. Connecting and building trust with your subscribers is key to maintaining and expanding audiences for your communications. Enjoy some garden-inspired tips and best practices to help you nurture strong subscriber relationships and grow your email lists.

1. Start with Strong Roots

Lay out a clear purpose and key guidelines for your email list as well as communicating the expected message frequency.

2. Cultivate the Landscape for Trust

Use double opt-in for subscriptions, always. You'll have specific, prior, explicit permission from all who join your list. Remember to make it easy for people to unsubscribe with one click.

3. Show Your True Colors

Simply put, be sure the "From" line states who you are.

4. Put Your Best Blooms on Display

Select your words carefully and craft short, succinct, subject lines that show how your subscribers will benefit from opening the message.

5. Create a Beautiful, Familiar Feel

Use HTML templates for consistent branding and easy recognition, plus time savings across every mailing.

6. Prune Your Lists

Track and analyze subscriber engagement. Use this data to reach out to inactive list members to see if they would still like to receive your messages.

7. Spread Your Seeds

Give your subscribers attractive opportunities to share your content and promote your lists to their contacts.

8. Share the Harvest

Make sure to optimize your email for mobile devices, including all major brands of smartphones and tablets.

9. Remember Garden Cleanup

Avoid cluttering up your list with irrelevant messages, especially with discussion groups. Rake, sweep, repeat and let your subscribers enjoy the view.

10. Grow Your Knowledge

Ask people who unsubscribe to shed light on how you can do better next time by encouraging feedback in your automated farewell messages.

11. Sow Success by Listening

Encourage subscribers to add their profile information and send periodic surveys. This helps you tailor your messages more closely to their needs and preferences.

12. Behold the Blossoms

Keep using email best practices and enjoy seeing how your newsletters, discussion groups and email marketing campaigns nurture strong subscriber relationships and loyalty.

Next Steps