Here are the best five ways to swing your customers’ love-hate relationship with your emails firmly into the love end:

  1. Let them choose the frequency

    Even though it may be standard retail procedure to send emails three or four times a week, that frequency can be deemed to be obtrusive to many of your customers. Give them the choice of when to receive their emails and you’ll find that they’ll be much happier and respond better. The most common way to allow your customers to have input as to when their emails are received is through your Preferences Center. If you don’t have a frequency selector method on your Center, now is a great time to plunk one in there! Make sure that once they have chosen their preferred frequency you never violate their stated preferences, even during holidays or special event times like Black Friday.

  2. Give them something free

    Everyone appreciates gifts and your email marketing campaign customers are no exception. The only limit to what you should be giving away free to your loyal email customers is what would bankrupt your company, as everything else is open for consideration. You can go the way of providing free upgrades, downloads, and vouchers they can redeem in your bricks and mortar outlets, or you can go the sweepstakes route. When you do run a contest be 100% certain that it is conducted in a fully ethical and transparent manner, you follow all the regulations for the various jurisdictions (beware of Quebec’s outrageous restrictions) and that the prizes are truly valuable. Your contest to win a smartphone cover is not going to be anywhere near as successful as the one which has a Mercedes-Benz as the grand prize!

  3. Embrace Responsive Web Design (RWD)

    Your customers are reading your emails on tiny smartphone screens, 30-inch computer monitors and absolutely everything in-between. If you’re not using RWD in your emails then today is the best time to start. By creating your email missives through the magic of RWD your emails will automatically resize themselves to fit any imaginable view screen anywhere. While standard HTML will simply shorten the line breaks and reflow when you decrease the size of the view window, RWD will resize everything in the email, including the images as it reflows. Coding RWD is not for the faint-hearted or HTML newbies, so ensure that your email design team is up to the challenge. Not only is RWD something that must be seen to be believed, your customers will be massively impressed and you will leave your competitors suffering from RWD envy.

  4. Give them truly personal attention

    No, this does not mean that you mail merge your customer’s first name into the subject line, as after receiving a few thousand “Jim, here is your personal download” subject line emails you can bet that Jim amply realizes that all he really is to you is a text field. You can implement true personalization in your brand’s email marketing campaign whether you have fifty subscribers or fifty thousand. The way to do this is to go beyond the name personalization and onto the aspect of behavior acknowledgment. Leverage all the information you have on your email subscribers to create missives which speak directly to who they are and what they are searching for on your pages in order to truly engage them.

  5. Respect their privacy

    The eternal tug of war between email marketers who want to know absolutely everything about their customers and the recipients who really don’t want to tell you much of anything at all should always be won by the customer. Meticulously analyze exactly what personal information you really need from your customer beyond name and zip code. Of course age and gender are important but unless you’re marketing specific facial cosmetics you don’t need to know their race, and unless you’re selling religious texts you don’t need to know their faith. Only collect the data you really need and don’t even ask for the rest.

Integrate all five of these ways into your email campaigns and get ready for the love-fest!

Author Bio:

by Hal Licino

Hal Licino is a leading blogger on HubPages, one of the Alexa Top 120 websites in the USA. Hal has written 2,500 HubPage articles on a wide range of topics, some of which have attracted upwards of 135,000 page views a day. His blogs are influential to the point where Hal single-handedly forced Apple to retract a national network iPhone TV commercial and has even mythbusted one of the Mythbusters. He has also written for major sites as Tripology, WebTVWire, and TripScoop.