The sting of a customer unsubscribing hurts but can be turned into a teachable moment. If the rate at which some your audience is unsubscribing gives you cause for concern, consider revising your email unsubscribe process.
There can actually be a benefit to unsubscribes. Keep reading to learn why letting your customers easily say hasta la vista actually works in your favor; maybe, just maybe, they’ll be back.
1. Protect Your Deliverability
Sending emails that don’t get opened by recipients is annoying; being reported as spam is the worst. Having customers unsubscribe is better than accidentally pushing them into pressing that SPAM button.
The unsubscribe process is a mutual and amicable separation; the divorce without the lawyer. It doesn’t have to mean goodbye forever since a customer can always come back. But if you make the process difficult or just plain ignore unsubscribe requests, you’ll get identified as SPAM – and that’s where your problems can start. Being marked as SPAM can affect your deliverability or inbox placement, and once it happens, it’s not easy to clean up.
2. Unsubscribes: The Not So Hidden Metric
The unsubscribe link is basically a call-to-action. By providing a link which allows people to easily click and unsubscribe, you are creating a trackable segment. The ability to see this metric provides marketers with the capability to see beyond what’s going wrong and understand who is opting out and infer why they’re opting out.
Monitoring the rate of your unsubscribes will enable you to see which of your campaigns do or don’t work. You could add a survey to help track why your subscribers want to leave, which provides another piece to the trackable puzzle.
3. Make The Unsubscribe Process Transparent
Feel like exasperating those people who are trying to opt out of your emails? Make opting out difficult. Using hard to see fonts and colors for a link is a no-go. Even worse — and illegal — is requiring passwords to complete the process. Make those links visible! You don’t have to be able to see them from space, but make sure you don’t need a magnifying glass to see them.
Focus on a way to make your customers reconsider unsubscribing by utilizing a preference center. Make the opt-out easy, but provide some extra options. That way your customers are not frustrated with your unsubscribe process, and they’re more inclined to stick around on their own terms. This may help you salvage your relationship with your customer.
Alternate options for your preference center include updating email addresses, changing mailing frequency, choosing which topic (or topics) they want to be contacted about, and communication type (maybe they prefer texts). Including these options is a smart way to play defense because they give your customer the option to opt down not out.
Being rejected is never fun and having customers unsubscribe can cause a red alert. The best way to combat that is to be proactive and provide your customers with a pleasant experience and options. By providing both, you can protect your deliverability and reputation and, more importantly, gather intel about when your customers unsubscribe and why. Make those unsubscribes work for you.