Tuesday 2¢ - Let Them Go

Adding my half arsed 2 cents to the ton of great advice you can get from the email marketing community on unsubscribes.

When you have a newsletter with subscribers, it’s inevitable that you also have subscribers who unsubscribe.

In the world of email marketing, there is a lot of chatter about those who unsubscribe, and plenty of professional help is available for dealing with the feeling of loss.

The reason subscribers are so valued is that they are people who are not just interested in your content today (those are visitors and page views), these lovely people have given a commitment to your future content.

They believe in you or your company and, as such, subscribers are a great trust metric (as you know, I bang on about marketing creating ART, Awareness, Revenue, and Trust).

Of course, folks unsubscribing is healthy; it's far better to have an engaged audience that chooses your content.

Additionally, most email metrics are percentages - for example, CTR (click-through-rate) represents the percentage of email recipients who clicked on something. So, if a greater proportion of your email list is engaged, the metrics look better.

Unsubscribers not only help some of the numbers look good, but they also help you sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of understanding who your people are.

To this end, some email marketers believe that it’s best practice to proactively unsubscribe you if you don’t keep up your end of the bargain (as they see it) and click on stuff (as no one trusts email open rate as a metric of engagement).

Mistakenly, sometimes I think.

I’ve had emails that say I will be unsubscribed if I don’t click on stuff. This is usually a relief, but one email newsletter I enjoyed a little bit did this.

I liked the email content, but I wasn’t interested in the stuff to click on - their services, courses, and such. So, they unsubscribed me and lost an engaged reader, presumably because CTR was more important to them than keeping me amused.

I’ve digressed - back to my point, when you see an unsubscribe, it’s easy to wonder why they unsubscribed.

What did you say or do that led the person to believe that your future content is not for them?

What shall we not do in the future to prevent future unsubscribes?

In short: What did we do wrong?

But for this short two cents, I wonder if we should flip that:

Do we know why they subscribed in the first place?

If we don’t know why they subscribed, spending any time wondering why they unsubscribed is probably a waste of time.

If you know why people subscribe to your content, then you can check if you are still consistently delivering against that promise or expectation.

If so, then it was something else, and nothing to see here.

Let them go.