Email Marketing Cornwall: Embrace your Unsubscribers

In my past blog posts, I gave practical advice on how you could optimise your existing email marketing campaign. This time I want you to rethink your approach on how to look at your unsubscribe rate.

Every campaign that I run involves work, dedication and high expectations. I am sure the same goes for you. When you then see that a handful of people decide to unsubscribe from your list, your first thought might by: What the heck?! The images look amazing, the content is sharp, the offer is tempting, the layout is user friendly so why on earth would anyone want to unsubscribe?

My advice is to relax and look at your campaign with the eyes of the reader. It will give you the reasons why a few of your subscribers decided to cancel their subscription. By doing that you will start valuing your unsubscribers a little bit more and most importantly embrace the information that they provide.

Here are some facts that you need to accept: 

1. Some are just not interested 

In this case, readers are not interested in your content any more either because it is of no relevance to them or because they don't like the information received. Try not to worry too much about it because turning those subscribers from leads into customers is almost impossible. By unsubscribing you are basically told that they are no longer keen on becoming your customer.

However, if they used to be regular customers, please do follow up and find out if by unsubscribing to your email marketing campaigns, they also stop being your paying customer. 

2. Helps you identify weaknesses

If you normally don't have many unsubscribes and all of a sudden one email marketing campaign generates a never seen before amount of cancellation, you will need to take a look at the mailer, content, images, layout, offer etc and find out what could have caused this behaviour. Use the information to your advantage and adapt future campaigns accordingly so that your weakness turns into your strength.
 

3. Keeps you on your toes

Use your unsubscribe rate as a wake up call as it tells you that your content is losing its appeal. Try not to be too repetitive, change your subject lines with every email marketing campaign as well as the images used and content provided.

The main message here is that unsubscribes are frustrating, but try to use the information provided to your advantage. Always look at who has unsubscribed and why. It will help you to keep the quality of your campaigns up and your unsubscribe rate down.