Segment your contacts
While there are appropriate times and emails to simply send to every contact in your contact list, because it yields higher response, segmenting your contacts into meaningful groups and sending targeted emails to the groups based on the nature of the group will be much more effective and prevent abnormally high unsubscribing.
Segmenting is all about knowing your customers, researching trends statistically, and effectively using reports built into your store’s admin. For instance, you want to send a campaign to customers who have not purchased in the last six months. (instructions for how to do so and create a segment in the tool)
Be consistent without being obnoxious
No one likes spam. The challenge is, spam is subject to the eye of the recipient. And each person has different opinions about what makes something spam. As an email marketer you do not want large numbers of your users pressing the “is spam” mechanism in their email software on one of your email campaigns. Many factors can contribute to the “is spam” decision, but one to be keenly aware of is the frequency of marketing (or any email communication for that matter) communications delivered in email.
To help with consistency, make sure you send emails in a frequency that doesn’t surprise your contacts. For instance, a marketing email about a Business Card promotion in the morning and one about brochures in the afternoon will likely result in a higher percentage of “is spam” activities.
Decide on a frequency and then evaluate your response (opens, clicks, unsubscribes) to determine if the frequency (in addition to the quality of the content) is working. Maybe start out with an email campaign a month, and if response goes well, increase to every other week. If response is good try weekly. At any point if you feel response is waning, maybe scale back to the point when the response was better and then see if you return to a more positive response profile.
Know your audience
There’s a reason most businesses that use email marketing successfully don’t outsource their email marketing. No one knows your customers like you know your customers. Don’t copy other business communications (by all means, use them for inspiration) but let your email campaigns be unique and targeted toward your customers that only you know best.
Be purpose-driven
While simply sending some sale product or service on a monthly basis is much better than never sending any email marketing, the email marketers who consistently have great click-through rates and response to their campaigns are those who plan ahead and are purposeful about their campaigns and the audience for those campaigns.