How to reduce the number of people who sign off from your list

Have you noticed that more and more subscribers are signing off from your mailing list? How do you avoid this and keep subscribers engaged? Keep reading to find out the secret of successful email marketers.

Some interesting statistics

Research conducted by Litmus says that  54% of people who participated in the survey say that brands send their newsletters too often. In the same survey 49% of the participants said they resigned because the body of the email was too repetitive and boring - almost half! Another 47% of responses said that they simply got too many emails and tried to reduce the amount of them in their mailboxes. Another 25% of responses indicate that email they get is not intended for them and the offer doesn’t fit to their needs.

Enough is enough

Think about the frequency of your campaigns. Nobody likes it when his or her mailbox is full of unread emails. Of course the right frequency is different for various types of businesses. Sometimes it’s a good choice to send a campaign once a month (so you don’t irritate your subscribers but at the same time you don’t let them forget you).

Research conducted by FreshMail says that more than 65% of our clients send email campaigns once a month. However there are clients who send commercial campaigns up to three times a week. What you have to do is to find a happy medium. First of all, don’t be afraid to experiment - just remember to observe the behaviour of your subscribers and to analyse reports.

In addition to that, you should determine the frequency of your campaigns after you answer this question: How much value and interesting content you are able to offer your subscribers? Is your message at least as interesting for your recipient as it is for you?  

But what exactly does this all mean? Take a look at a few suggestions:

Tell me what is inside

As mentioned above, one of the main reasons why your subscribers end their relationship with you is that your emails are repetitive and boring. Think about it:

• Do you think carefully about what you send?
• Do you try to surprise your clients?
• Do you prepare special content for them?
• Do you differentiate content on the basis of what you know about a particular group of clients?

Email marketing is no longer only about sending the same communication to everyone. It’s more like a one to one meeting and building relationships. If you answered “no” to any of the questions above, you have a job to do in the very near future.

To be able to send personalized campaigns, you need to segment your subscribers list. You can divide the addresses in your database on the basis of any custom field you have in you system. This can be things like gender or past loyalty rate. Other aspects of susbscriber behaviour can also determine how you can segment them into different lists. They can be grouped according to who has opened a particular campaign,  who clicked on a particular link or links, who didn’t open a given email etc. Thanks to this you can better determine what kind of products your subscribers are interested in and then send them a special offer in the category of products that matches their interests.

Think about the benefits for the person who gets your email - exclusive discounts, expertise, access to useful reports or other valuable information, etc.

Right on time!

As mentioned already, almost half of respondents feel overhelmed by the amount of emails they receive. How can you overcome that? Optimize the time and day when your campaigns are sent. There is no standard recipe to follow that will tell you when it’s the right time to send campaign. All you can do is test, test and test again. All good email marketing systems give you the ability to use time optimization - in FreshMail you can test the time of day or day of the week to let you know when your subscribers are most likely to open your messages.

Time to say goodbye? Stay professional

Please remember that if someone chooses to resign from your subscriber list, your obligation is to allow the person to do so via a resign link. You may think it strange, but there is a reason to think about this positively. The fact of the matter is that you can’t please everyone and the point is not to build the biggest list but the best one. A smaller list of people who are interested in your offer and are open to receiving your emails is always preferable to a larger list with lots of people who are not. A resignation from your subscriber list is nothing to celebrate but the fact remains that the list now has one fewer person who didn’t really want to be there.

All this being said, your unsubscribe rate is a kind of measuring stick of the overall quality of your database. It should be relatively stable but a steady increase with each campaign can be a sign that it’s time to take a closer look at some of the points made here.

Have a look at the FreshMail Resource Center for more information.