|
You need a good quality list. When people voluntarily unsubscribe, it actually saves you money. You're no longer paying to send emails to people who aren't interested in your content and will never buy your products and services. Many email marketing experts actually advise that you manually clean up your list about once a year, anyway — so people who unsubscribe are actually saving you some work, too. As the quality of your list continues to improve as disinterested people opt out, your open and click-through rates also go up … which is always a good thing! As unengaged subscribers leave your list, the overall quality of that list improves, until you are only left with the best possible customers and prospects.
No excuse to get lazy There are folks in the marketing Business Email List world who advise content creators to personally investigate why every unsubscribe occurs (by manually tracking down the people who opt out, and asking them why they were unhappy enough to leave). Their advice is to try to minimize unsubscribes by trying to make everyone happy. Besides the fact that chasing after someone who just unsubscribed from your list is totally obnoxious (and probably illegal), the idea of trying to make everyone happy is a recipe for total disaster. Your job is not to make everyone happy — it's to do your absolute best for your target audience, and let people who are NOT your target market self-select out. If you take care of your list and make sure you are being an ethical online marketer, you don't have to chase after every person who unsubscribes and find out why they dropped you. Send your subscribers high-quality, useful content on a regular basis. Don't publish junk content.
Don't overpromote. Don't abuse your list. Be sensitive to burning your subscribers out with too much pushy sales language. Maintain a good balance between cookie content and relevant offers and promotions. Here's the only metric that really matters, when it comes to unsubscribes: Your list should be growing over time. As long as the overall numbers are going up (even if it's slow going), and you're retaining more people than you lose, you're on the right track. And when unsubscribes happen, don't weep — rejoice. They're good for your mental health, your business, and your wallet.
|
|