Relevant Email – Driver of Top Open Rates and Click-Throughs

Everyone is concerned about building a powerful email list that will deliver sales. And delivering relevant email is at the heart of it all.

To capture the interest and attention of your recipients, you must provide relevant information that addresses their high-priority challenges. Keep in mind that many people we contact through email marketing efforts receive between 10 and 20 newsletters a month, yet may only read two or three. You want your email newsletter to be one of those two or three. That means you must be relentless in delivering newsletter content and resources that make your material most relevant to your email subscribers’ top challenges. And, being relentless means you need to continually ask your audience what they want to read more about.

Here are five ways to help ensure that your email marketing is relevant to your subscribers:

1. Conduct Online Surveys. Use an online survey tool such as QuestionPro or SurveyMonkey to find out what your subscribers need or want to learn about.
2. Include a Survey in Your Welcome Emails. When someone signs up for your newsletter, send an immediate trigger email asking for the single most important topic he or she would like to learn more about. Make the note sound as personal as possible, engaging the person at an individual level.
3. Ask Subscribers to Rate Your Articles. Collect data on how people like your email newsletter content by providing subscribers with a quick click-and-submit radio button selector that includes a rating scale at the end of each article.
4. Pay Attention to Your Click-Through Metrics. Look at your click-throughs in every email, as well as across emails, to see which topics your audience is most interested in. Write more on those topics for your email newsletters and on your Web site.
5. Use Keyword Research. Do some keyword research using any of a variety of online tools (e.g. WordTracker) to see what people are searching for and with what frequency. This is yet another way to help you determine the topics you should write about.

Of course, there are other ways to figure out what’s relevant to your email subscribers. Once you know what matters to your audience, you can begin the work of generating your list of article topics and writing about or massaging these issues into your content.

Please share your stories, examples, and tips about how you’ve made your emails relevant to your audience, successfully driving your sales or other calls to action. Thanks for your input!