3 Tips for Respecting Your Mailing List Subscribers

For businesses, and particularly for businesses that do most of their trade online, the mailing list is somewhat hallowed ground. Depending on your marketing strategy, you likely rely on your email marketing and mailing list to communicate to customers, let them know about specials, promotions or new services, and keep them informed of their orders and deliveries. For this reason, having that ability to contact your customers by email is important, and having them unsubscribe from your mailing list might mean a loss in revenue. That’s why it is important to know how to respect your mailing list subscribers.

Be Mindful of Their Time

Your customers are busy, and they aren’t going to dedicate much time to your email newsletters. That means you need to have a real strategy for how often you send them an email, the length of the email, and the key takeaway points in each you definitely want them to see. There are plenty of design tips and content tips for how to layout your emails and what to include in them, but perhaps more important is the email frequency and the actual content you want to be communicated.

If you send too many emails, users will begin to simply ignore them or unsubscribe, so finding the right balance is key – and only you’ll know what that balance is based on your business.

Send Email to Them Only if You Know They Want It

Never send email to anyone that hasn’t explicitly asked for it. Doing so might end up leaving your customers resentful of your business rather than responding positively to your mailing list emails. Strategies to ensure they are expecting your emails, like double opt-in and an explicit checkmark in an online form asking if they want to receive your email, rather than a checkmark they have to check not to receive them, are all good strategies to ensure your recipients want to receive your email – and a way to ensure they will be received positively.

You should also never just sign your existing subscribers up to new emailing lists you start. Instead, ask them to opt-in if they want to.

Don’t Break Their Trust

This one is a simple one, but no less important. Your email subscribers have entrusted you with their details so that you can send them an email. Under no circumstances should you give these details to any other companies or sell them to marketing companies. These details were given to your company for your use, and distributing them will break your subscribers’ trust and likely mean that they will be hesitant to trust your business too.

As you can see, ensuring your channel of communication via email stays open and your subscribers stay subscribed isn’t particularly difficult, provided you respect your customers. The key takeaways are not to spam your customers, not to sign them up for mailing lists they didn’t ask to be signed up for, and to absolutely first and foremost respect their time and privacy. With those tips in mind, retaining mailing list subscribers should be no problem at all.