Lots of email marketers tend to look for quantity in their lists vs. quality. Which usually leaves the unsubscribes looking bad sometimes. Are unsubscribes a bad thing?
Actually no, not really. You can learn a lot from those people who opt out of your list, which means you can end up with stronger, better email marketing in the end. You only need to learn to see the benefits of people leaving your list, and how you can use those unsubscribes to your advantage.
You should, in fact, go beyond seeing who’s leaving and the benefits and embrace the whole, leaving from your list ordeal, for what you gain from it. Still not convinced? Check out a few reasons below as to why you should embrace this concept.
Unsubscribes can improve delivery
Unsubscribes are a great way for ‘weeding the garden’, or in this case they weed themselves from the ground rather than you doing all of the work.
Besides, what is a weed but an unwanted plant that takes away the nutrients and sunshine from the plants that you actually want to grow? People who don’t want to hear what you have to say just drag down your deliverability by not engaging with your email. It’s just like how weeds are plants that crowd the plants you really want to grow in your garden. Besides if you think about it, you don’t want to be dragging those un-subscribers around because they would be costing you money. And just as the weeds, you are better off without them. So let go of them gladly!
Think of it this way: Letting go of your un-subscribers is helping with your list hygiene. It’s clean, healthy and going to increase your inbox engagement rate; therefore, it will increase your deliverability.
Un-subscribers can save you from spam reports
One great thing about un-subscribers is that they are much better than a spam complaint! You can think of an un-subscribe as a between-you-and-me sort of way to leave your list and you don’t bug them again. A spam complaint drags in the ISP, advertises the dissatisfaction of the subscriber to the ISP, and in turn reflects on your poorly.
That’s why you should make it easy for people to unsubscribe. It helps by having it in a easy to find place with an easy process. (Note: It’s probably a good idea to not ask someone to log into unsubscribe. It takes to long and if they can’t remember a username or password to get in, they will start using the spam button instead.)
Sometimes an increase in un-subscribes can improve ROI
Just like all, many email marketers are weary of increasing the frequency sends of their emails, weary that it will cause an increase in their un-subscribers. However, a great study by Alchemy Worx showed there is a cost vs. benefit when sending goes up and marketers need to find out which one is the bigger payoff: to increase frequency or not. While the study did find that increasing the frequency did increase the unsubscribes, sending more emails also increased revenue, making it justifiable to cover, even with the loss of email subscribers.
You’ll need to test this in your own organization to see what results you get that are best for your company. It’s definitely an indicator however that people who unsubscribe from your list really aren’t meant to be on your list anyway.
Unsubscribes can improve your email marketing
To top it all off, unsubscribes can be educational. They are a great way for subscribers to vote for or against the content of the email They can spike, letting you know the sudden change wasn’t so good. Or they can regularly be higher in the acceptable number, causing you to re-evaluate your email marketing strategy overall. For example, here at PlanPlus Online, I wear a few different hats, while being the marketing designer, I also help take care of some of the email campaigns. We’ve been working on a few different strategies to make our customers enjoy the content we are offering them. One we have had, is for our Real Estate customers, wanting to give them good information, but not too much that they take a disinterest in the content. We’ve found that short, sweet and to the point with them is what works best. They are busy people, they enjoy a good layout, but don’t want too much content because they are constantly on the move.
If you have a choice of 10,000 subscribers who regularly respond, engage with your emails and buy from you, your much better off than with a list of 100,000 subscribers who don’t want anything to do with you. Which would you rather have? If it’s ROI your after and not an ego boost, you’ll want smaller, active lists that are happy with your emails and un-subscribers can get you there.
