Dealing with unsubscribes

During your email marketing campaign you will definitely face the problem of unsubscribes. It is something usual and shouldn’t be considered a reason for panic. Still a sharp increase in number of unsubscribes should attract your attention because it may be the evidence of some serious problems in your email campaign.

Scrutinizing the unsubscribe phenomenon were determined the main causes why people are likely to leave emailings. Here are some of them:

• Emailing frequency. While sending email newsletters or advertising messages you always are in risk of becoming irritating to your subscriber. Annoyance that very fast is associated by subscribers with your email messages may cause not only increase in opt-outs, but also will have a negative impact on reputation. There is no general rule to how many times would be just enough to send messages, but on average 1-2 messages are both effective and not annoying. Unexpected emails are also more likely to be deleted by receivers. Being tired of unsolicited emails your subscribers may want to unsubscribe.
• Content irrelevancy. The message can be irrelevant in both cases: while is long and while is short. Sometimes it happens email marketer decides to send message with more information in it, trying to avoid using personalization. But what is the possibility the subscriber will be able to find the information he is interested in? Or with other words, will the subscriber want to spend his/her time and look for relevant information in the whole volume of information sent? It is the same boring as to read something unimportant in a small email message, which was send just to heighten open-rates. Thus subscribers for sure won’t stand it too long, and it is predictable they will unsubscribe soon. The same result may cause permanent mistakes in your messages, such as bad links or links that lead to different page it should, impossible to view images and HTML content.
• Your subscribers are people, and it is in human nature to change preferences. Something that your recipient was interested in 1 month ago may not interest him/her at present. Therefore subscribers will be more likely to sign-out.

There are many ways to resolve such situations. The most important step email marketer should undertake is to understand that he/she is working for people, but not people exist for his/her business. The success of one or another email marketing campaign is fully dependent on subscribers’ actions, the main concern email marketer should take in consideration is to create subscriber-oriented and personalized email marketing campaign.

However the cases of signing-out may happen even though the campaign was planned perfectly. Therefore there always should be a working “unsubscribe” link or button, so that the subscriber could easily get to opt-out page. Here we have to say some words about the design of unsubscribe page. You have to get as much as you may get from it: you have to consider the possibility of re-engageing your subscriber or at least of getting the information that could help prevent unsubscribing. You always have to be ready to offer other options to chose from, so that user could chose something more preferable if subscriber changes his/her mind and decides not to opt-out, but just change the preferences. Also consider placing the survey about what exact subscriber didn’t like about your email messages. One more important point is that if the desire to unsubscribe is final, you never have should intervene it and should delete subscriber’s email address from your database immediately.

Maybe you will not be able to protect yourself from unsubscribes during your email marketing campaign, but following these simple rules you will be able to make the process as painless as possible for both, you and your subscriber.

Sunday, September 12th, 2010 : Email Marketing : No Comments