Happiness is an Unsubscribed Email. Slim Down Your Subscription List Today and Get Ready for Summer Sales!
You’ve spent a lot of time and money getting people to sign up for your email marketing. You’ve logged countless days finetuning your lead generation programs. You’ve invested a lot of sleepless nights understanding pay-per-click ads and social media campaigns. You’ve sweated every personalized subject line. You’ve done it!
Now we’d like you to ask these same people to unsubscribe from your emails. Seriously. Email unsubscribes are a good thing! Hubspot recently unsubscribed 250,000 people from their lists. We’ve been taught to think all is lost when a customer clicks the unsubscribe link in our newsletter and email promotions. All that work is over and done with!
Well, it’s actually to your benefit to ask people to unsubscribe from your email list. And ask you should. The question is, when? When do I end it? That’s always the biggest question in any relationship.
I’m New to This -- Why Should I Ask People to Unsubscribe from My Email List?
Size can mislead us to believe our business is successful. It’s all about growth, right? Is bigger better? It’s better not to have that illusion based on the number of clicks to our website or the number of email subscribers we have.
What matters is active customers, not how many people are on your email list. Some people unsubscribe from our emails on their own – but this number is few. On average less than 0.5% of us go to the trouble to find the unsubscribe link and click it. On the other hand, the average open rate of emails is only about 25%. So what are the other 74.05% of the people doing with our emails? They are probably ignoring them, deleting them, or they are bouncing. That isn’t an efficient or sustainable way to do business. Our time is money, so we want our email processes to be sustainable and time-saving.
Many of our subscribers are not ideal customers. Even if we have segmented our lists, perhaps they only signed up to get that 10% savings offer from their first order.
Another reason people are not unsubscribing is that we have developed a new definition of what is spam mail and what is not. Our tolerance level is much higher. Asking people to unsubscribe can address that issue.
Most of our email lists are full of people who are not going to buy anything, or anything more, which means we are spending a lot of time and money emailing them for no reason. You can make your email lists better by removing either uninterested or inactive people.
If you can identify which people are interested in actually spending money, you maximize your email ROI.
“Much of the answer has to do with how many of our readers are not ideal customers… if you biff lousy prospects in the right way, you simultaneously improve the quality of good prospects.” Unbounce
Just to Recap - How Should I Ask People to Unsubscribe from My Emails?
We have to let people unsubscribe - that’s the law. You probably already include an unsubscribe button in your emails. Maybe it’s in the footer or in the body somewhere. Make it noticeable and useful.
Use a double opt-out for your email unsubscribe function.
Make the unsubscribe button large enough to be seen.
Add a resubscribe option - perhaps they hit unsubscribe in error.
Say you’re sorry to see them go - being polite is never wrong.
You might ask them why they are unsubscribing in a survey form. Keep it short.
Your unsubscribe function should be evergreen - no popups or ads. Keep it clean.
In addition to the standard unsubscribe function at the bottom of every mail, you can proactively prune your lists by sending an email asking for an unsubscribe. Explain to everybody why you are asking them to unsubscribe. Add a survey and ask questions. Give them the option to subscribe using a different email address instead of their personal one.
Breaking up is never easy to do, but asking people to unsubscribe is a chance to reach out and learn how you can better deliver what they want. You may be surprised! You might get additional orders and better customer loyalty in the process.
“At first glance, unsubscribes seem negative. More unsubscribes mean fewer people in your database, fewer people that receive your emails—and less return on investment for your email program. Right? Wrong. Unsubscribes can be a good thing for your brand.” Litmus
Got it. So When is a Good Time to Ask People to Unsubscribe from My Email List?
Ask for May, settle for June is our advice. Oh, wait, sorry! That’s the advice we gave our daughter for her wedding. When should you ask people to unsubscribe? Look at your numbers and ask yourself:
When did this person first subscribe?
When was the last time they opened an email?
When was the last time they clicked on a link in an email campaign?
When was the last time they ordered something from us?
All are good indicators that a contact is maybe not your ideal customer, and you can reach out with an unsubscribe offer. It’s always a good idea to reduce services to unprofitable customers, and sending emails is a service you provide.
It’s a good time to send an unsubscribe mail when:
Send people an unsubscribe prompt if they’ve been inactive for a certain period of time. Usually, that’s six months. You can get ahead of that unsubscribe prompt, though. Be proactive and ask an inactive subscriber if they want to stick around after three months. That’s a quarterly clean-up you can add to your marketing calendar. You may even move them to a different nurture campaign (but that’s another blog post).Remember: Unsubscribes are an opportunity for feedback. Combine that feedback loop with information about any changes to your business (or theirs), products, or the marketplace in general.
“Give it a couple of days. Then remove those who don’t click. Hitting that delete button will hurt your gross numbers. But your open rates and clickthroughs will thank you (and that’s usually a great tradeoff in a world of spam filters and “promotions” tabs).” Amanda Natividad, SparkToro
Got Bloated Email Lists? It’s Okay to Slim Down.
If a little of something is good, then more must be better. At least so goes the thinking. Let’s rethink that because it doesn’t cut the mustard for our email lists. It works well for prepaid newspaper and theater subscriptions. Still, with tens of thousands of hits to our websites occurring every week, the value of these numbers is becoming as questionable as those PowerPoint presentations we’re shown.
Listen. If two hundred people attend your roadshow but only ten order the product, then there were only ten people at your roadshow. The other one hundred and ninety came for the free coffee. Do you have time to walk people around the store while they browse? No! As Cuba Gooding, Jr., in the film, Jerry Maguire famously reminds us, “show me the money!”
It’s okay to trim your mailing list. It’s okay to ask people to unsubscribe from your emails. It’s okay to fire clients. It’s okay to focus your time on only those customers who need your help. That’s what they’re paying for, right? That’s why medical specialists and ace lawyers are booked out months in advance. If they accepted everyone, then no one would want them anymore.
Honestly, it’s okay to remove people from your mailing lists. Look at your conversion rates – are they 25%? Then 75% of your emails went to people who weren’t interested. Why are you bothering the good people? Be nice and unsubscribe them. They’ll thank you.
“List bloat occurs when you have a large pumped-up list, with very low open rates and conversion rates. List bloat misleads business owners into a false sense of security and unrealistic email performance expectations.” Bourn Creative
Got Bloat? Let Us Help You Get the Most From Your Email Marketing Efforts
If email marketing campaigns aren’t one of your company’s most valuable assets, it’s probably because your current customer database is hindering your results.Instead of continuing to suffer from underwhelming ROIs, let AWI help utilize one of the products from our Email Suite and create a profitable database you’ll be able to leverage again and again.
Otherwise, our team would be more than happy to handle your entire campaign end-to-end. AWI delivers all you need to sit back, relax, and enjoy the results!
Be Certain.
