For email marketers, a certain amount of email marketing list depreciation is expected. After all, you can’t please everyone 100% of the time. But you can use a couple of quick-win tactics to reduce your overall number of unsubscribes.
Reducing unsubscribe rates is always a goal for email marketers. You work hard and invest a lot of money into growing your marketing lists. Keeping these subscribers engaged is vital. Creating a consistent, loyal customer base helps you maintain and grow your business. So, when it’s looking like your list is disengaging with your marketing, it’s time to consider how you can bring them back into the fold.
Understanding why readers unsubscribe
While marketing list depreciation is expected, you want to keep it as minimal as possible. To properly optimize customers’ experiences with your email marketing, you need to understand why people unsubscribe in the first place.
Surveying customers at the point of unsubscription is the only way you will gather real insight into their actions. This will give you a clear idea of what element of the customer experience you need to prioritize improving.
3 top tips to reduce unsubscribes
1. Personalize
Personalization is essential in modern marketing. Whether you’re a B2B, B2C, or non-profit brand, customers expect uniquely personal experiences from brands. Failing to meet this expectation will drive disappointed and unengaged customers to unsubscribe.
Personalization can take many forms. From using first names and dynamic content to segmentation, all personalization tactics have a positive impact on the reader’s experience.
Segmentation ensures that the content you’re delivering to the reader is relevant. No one wants to receive irrelevant content. The more they deem your content irrelevant to them, the more they will ignore your marketing efforts. So, by targeting audience groups based on gender, company size, or location you’ll be surfacing content important to the individual recipient.
Dynamic content blocks such as product recommendations also go a long way in personalizing your email marketing. Especially using AI-powered product recommendations, every email will be automatically populated with content unique to the reader based on their previous behavior.
Nothing demonstrates how well you know your readers than a personalized email. It speaks directly to their interests and behaviors, making yours an email they’ll want to open. The more you deliver relevant content, the more value customers will get from the relationship. Unsubscribes rates will fall significantly when you start delivering one-to-one marketing.
2. Re-engage
There are a lot of tools in the marketer’s arsenal that can help you identify customers who are becoming disengaged with your marketing. From RFM to lead scoring, you should be keeping a close eye on your customer’s behavior to prevent losing them.
An automated re-engagement program is a perfect way to bring customers back into the fold before they leave you forever. Using insights gathered from your RFM persona tracking or lead scoring, you can trigger this program as soon as a customer begins to lapse.
Well-timed “we miss you” emails, teamed with an incentive can be enough to drive a shopper back to your website. You can also use this program to drive subscribers to update their marketing preferences or complete a survey. By asking for feedback or encouraging a review of their marketing preferences, you’re demonstrating your commitment to the customer. It’s a clear demonstration that you care about their experience and are willing to change to fulfill their needs.
This will go a long way towards keep readers happy. All too often customers are bombarded with marketing emails, so giving them control of their relationship with you will set you high above the competition. And no one’s going to unsubscribe from a brand that clearly cares about its customers.
3. Familiarize
Don’t wait until you’re on the cusp of losing a customer to remind them why your brand is the one. Newsletters – real ones, not just sales emails masquerading as a newsletter – are essential for establishing strong relationships with your readers.
You should be thinking about what kind of content will add the most value to your reader’s experience. Educational articles about how to get the most out of your products and services are an automatic win. They prove that you care about their overall experience, not just making a sale.
As are stories about your brand. To help establish a strong bond between the customer and your brand, you need to be showing them the people behind the brand. The more human you are to the reader, the stronger the relationship will be. Demonstrating your brand values around the economic, environmental, and social issues reminds the reader that you’re passionate about the same causes as them.
Unsubscribe rates will drop when readers get to know the people behind the brand. Human connections are vital, even in the world of digital marketing.
