Get people to sign up and stay.
If you’ve been in marketing for any amount of time, you’ve probably used email marketing. It is one of the oldest pieces of digital marketing, but still an industry favorite. It gives you total control over your list of contacts and the content they receive. There are no algorithms or content restrictions to worry about.
Building an email list is can be a daunting task, but the most used method is an incentive. A business will give an ebook or something relevant to the niche away if someone puts their email down. This strategy is effective especially if there is a good deal of search traffic around the item you are giving away. The startup I used to work for would give away ebooks about fitness and the creators I follow give away Lightroom presets or video overlays.
Some may be tempted to give away a large gift for subscribers. This will track more subscribers, right? Initially, this is true, but do you have problems with a large rate of unsubscriptions? Your subscription incentive may be to blame.
The Consistency Principle
The consistency principle is the idea that people tend to act in ways that are consistent with what they have already said or done. In most cases, the automatic response of consistency saves time and brainpower. In this context, you have already gotten your customers to commit to putting in their email. The customer has already chosen to give you their email.
So why does the size of your incentive matter so much? In his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini says that the most important factor of commitment and consistency is that people take inner responsibility for their actions. They have to own their commitments and large incentives may prevent this from happening. If a subscriber is able to justify an action with the size of the incentive then they will probably unsubscribe. Your incentives should be enough to draw subscribers, but small enough that subscribers cannot justify what they have done entirely to the incentive.
After Sign Up…
To truly leverage the consistency principle, once a subscriber signs up, it is important to give them a reason to stay other than the initial incentive. This is often easy because they will be looking for reasons to stay. I said earlier, they have already subscribed, and to remain consistent and avoid cognitive dissonance, they will look for reasons to support their actions. The first reason is the incentive, but the issue that marketers face is that this is not enough to keep people around. To achieve retention, provide enormous value in your first email and give a preview of what is to come. This will provide a new subscriber with more reasons to stay once the initial reason of an incentive is used. If you are interested more in the topic of consistency, I highly recommend reading Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion that I referenced earlier. Cialdini has so many insights that apply to marketing and I cannot recommend this book enough. Also, if you want help setting up your email campaign, contact me.