What can you do about 'list fatigue'?

Significant drops in open rates, CTRs, forwards and most importantly conversions, can all be attributed to this loathsome fiend. You might have also noticed that a subscriber's social media interaction with you and your brand/company is lagging.

Fear not! The good news is there are a few proactive steps you can take that should help to significantly reduce your list fatigue.

Steps to take

The trick is to find out what's causing it in your subscribers and work out what you can do to get them interested again in what you have to offer. After all, they must have been interested in something, otherwise they wouldn't have signed up for your email newsletters in the first place.

One of the main reasons list fatigue occurs is because of overly frequent campaigns. Think about it: do you really need to email your subscribers every day? Or even every week? Rather consider a fortnightly or monthly campaign that is jam-packed with interesting offers, news, updates and links, as opposed to an annoying daily email that fails to grab anyone's attention.

Don't worry, your subscribers won't forget about you if they don't hear from you every day. On the contrary, they'll come to appreciate you more if you've actually taken interest (and subsequent action) from the useful information you've learned about them along the way.

Don't assume

Whatever you do, don't assume they want (or need) to hear from you as often as you'd like to imagine, I can almost guarantee you that they don't. To be safe, stick to the fortnightly/monthly email newsletter. If they want to receive emails more often then they'll ask you first.

Another big reason why you might be experiencing subscriber sluggishness is that your content is no longer appealing. This, together with how you segment and target your audience, is also intrinsically linked to frequency and email preference centres. You really do need to give your subscribers a place to update their profiles, share their interests, let you know more about them and choose which of your newsletters they want to receive and how often.

The best way to do this is with an email preference centre. It's quite simple really. Your subscribers tell you what they want, you listen and do what you can to deliver it on their terms and presto, everyone is a winner! This is a fact (and maybe even the easiest 'metric' to figure out).

The option to unsubscribe

You need to make sure that you also give them the option of unsubscribing. This is actually a law, and yet, there are many who make it incredibly difficult to unsubscribe from a simple newsletter.

All you need to include in your campaign is a clear unsubscribe link that doesn't require them to confirm long forgotten user name/password combinations. You get bonus points for immediately unsubscribing those who request it and not continue to blast them with your emails because it 'can take up to 10 days to remove your address from the list'. We all know this is utter nonsense.

Finally, how often do you test? If you've made some changes to your campaign and joshed up the content/offer to better target your precious customers, then it's time to test one of your old campaigns against the new improved one. I can almost guarantee you'll start to see immediate improvement in those metrics you're hankering after.

Keep at it

Of course, once you start seeing better results, you need to keep at it. Figure out what content/subject lines/offers are getting better open rates and conversions and aim to optimise future campaigns along similar lines. Continue to monitor and question your subscribers about things they'd like to see in your newsletters but, most importantly, focus on what you do have control over and let lie that which is out of your hands.

You should aim to please those subscribers who are actually interested in what you have to offer, and don't waste time, money and energy on subscribers who have already moved on themselves.