People unsubscribe from email lists for a number of different reasons; be it the deactivation of the existing email address, change in location, or mere loss of interest. Whatever the reason behind the decreasing number of email subscribers may be, maintaining and growing your email list is vital for successful digital marketing operations. Email marketing is one of the most successful forms of digital marketing, and should be optimized to prevent missing out on potential buyers. Though marketers use advanced tools and strategies for successful email marketing, most of them make the mistake of not focusing on retaining lost subscribers.
To maintain and grow your business, you need to bring back lost customers by offering them what they need. Reactivation campaigns help you to understand the reason behind a consumer’s decision to unsubscribe from your email list. It also re-engages with your lost customers by telling them how you miss them and eventually asking why they lost interest. Analyzing unsubscribes can save your email marketing program by providing needed insights into where your campaign failed.
Marketers need to track the unsubscribe rates to understand the effectiveness of the email marketing campaigns. They also need to gather information about the person and the circumstances leading to the unsubscribe. Here are a few things that you need to analyze to understand the reasons:
- Identify the subscription source to understand if the subscription was through an organic search, affiliates, or contests.
- Figure out the number of emails received by the recipient before opting out to understand how engaged they were and how long the recipient was subscribed.
- Count the number of emails opened and links clicked within the email to understand the recipient’s interest and the pages visited on your website.
- Check the unsubscribed account’s purchase history, if any, to understand the customer’s product interest and the last bought product. This will help you identify if anything went wrong in the previous purchase, which led to the un-subscription.
- Track the last email received before unsubscribing to find out why the customer unsubscribed.
Email marketers often make the mistake of not monitoring why recipients unsubscribe. But it is essential to understand the reasons behind such action if you are willing to reduce the yearly subscription rate. To help you understand how to analyze unsubscribes to improve your email performance, here are a few strategies that you can follow.
Add a personal touch
Addressing your customers just by their name is not enough to show how important they are for your business. To attract the reader’s attention, you need to know a customer’s personal information and add it to your emails. You could wish them well on their special days if there was mention of it in the subscription form. The emotional bonding created by adding such small personal touches to your email content can do wonders to your business by generating long-term relationships. You need to analyze if your emails lack personal touch.
Never stop growing your email list
Every year, organizations lose a huge section of their email subscribers due to a change in interest or because of an address change. It is essential to keep building your email list to make up for lost subscriptions and higher market retention. Analyze if you need to put more effort into growing the email list.
Do not escalate overnight email sent volume
Suppose you had been sending emails to a niche, small, and targeted list of active subscribers and suddenly decided to send emails to every contact in your email list. In that case, the ISPs of recipients will assume this rampant increase in email volume to be suspicious and start marking emails as spam. Targeting a large volume of contacts overnight without following any planned and gradual targeting strategies negatively impacts the email sender’s reputation.
Remember, you don’t want to bombard people with emails. They are probably not interested in hearing from you everyday! Watch your email frequency to avoid unsubscribes. A subscription management center or email preference center gives your target market the option to select what kind of emails they would prefer to receive from your organization and at what interval.
Targeting inactive subscribers
Targeting inactive subscribers who did not engage with your email messages for the last six months or the previous holiday season can cause high bounce rates and create email spam traps. As the receivers do not open your emails for a long time, it lowers your email open and clicks rates while increasing unsubscribe rate. Thus, your emails automatically get marked as spam, leading to email deliverability issues and damages the sender’s reputation score.
Rapid increase of email frequency
Many organizations target customers and prospects with weekly sales newsletters, that they often increase up to three times per week or, even worse, daily to achieve their holiday sales target. This makes the subscribers face “inbox noise,” leading them to unsubscribe from your email list or marking emails as spam, which will prevent your future emails from reaching their inboxes.
Do not send irrelevant content
Identify if the products and services that you offer are still of the customer’s interest. If you realize that the customer is no longer interested in your offering, try to find a connection between their part and your offering. If you fail to see any connections, you should remove them from your email list.
There can be several other reasons for a subscriber to unsubscribe from your email lists, such as increased product pricing, faulty service, poor content, or better offers from competitors. You need to find out the loophole in your email marketing program and work on it to reduce the un-subscription rate. You can also offer options such as pausing emails, reducing the frequency, or selecting the types of emails to receive.
Yes, analyzing unsubscribes can save your email marketing program. Don’t forget to use the tips above to examine this often-overlooked source of data.
