Content Is King - Ways to Know What Your Subscribers Want

A successful newsletter is neither the one sent to an enormous number of subscribers nor the one that generated a lot of sales or phone inquiries. It is the one that makes your subscribers happy and makes them want more.

Following the unsubscribe figures of your email campaign

Following the unsubscribe figures of your email campaign statistics is a vital part of any email marketing campaign. They speak more than all of the other figures you can evaluate. If the unsubscribe levels are big, it is a definite sign that your customers are not receiving the information that they want from you.

Which content is the right content?

To overcome this difficulty, you should devise ways of tracking which content is the right content and what your subscribers want. It's a long process of monitoring and refining until you find just the right formula.

How do you know what content resonates most with your readers? Similar to a scientific experiment in a laboratory – do some testing. Try different content concepts and track the resulting response. Carefully examine the figures to see which articles, products, or banners are clicked-on the most. Since it is a trial, stick to main types of information, products, and services. For example, if you are selling clothing, do not show the whole range of men's shirts. Instead show several general types of clothes such as men's shirt, women's dresses, skirts and trousers, and so on. Obviously if you are getting a lot of clicks from the shirts and the skirts but nothing from the rest then you have found the content your subscribers want to see from you.

Be specific and analyze

After you have figures about the "bread and butter" preferences of your subscribers, examine the details. In the next newsletter provide more specific products. If we use the above example, add casual, formal and Hawaiian men's shirts, and evening, casual, ethno dresses. After several mailings you are likely to know not only what types of products your subscribers are interested in but the top individual product interest as well.

The content selection process can be accompanied by careful analysis of the traffic received through the website. Monitor which sections of your site get most of the clicks and decide why this is happens. Likely it is because some sections are promoted better than others and that is the reason for the heavy traffic. A section that has equal display to the rest of the sections, and still gets a lot of clicks, shows a hot area of your customer's preferences.

Finally keep in mind that some products and services are, to some extent, influenced by the seasons. If you are trying to figure out which is the right content for such kind of business, then you will need to monitor and test different email marketing campaigns for at least a year.

Make a survey

A shortcut to determining which content is best for your company is to make a survey. Ask all the questions you want and analyze the answers. Offer some incentive for survey participation to increase the number of people who will be eager to answer your questions.