8 Tips for Lowering your Email Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rates are a tricky matter for email marketers. While paying attention to unsubscribes is important i, if you’re following best practices there may not be much significance to your numbers. In other words, don’t lose your head if the numbers are over 0% (spoiler alert… they will be).
Generally, unsubscribe rates are 2% or less, so there should be no cause for concern if your rates are within 0.5% of that number. However, if you’re noticing particularly high unsubscribe rates, consider some of these tips to help get those numbers down.
1. Clean Your List
The easiest way to start seeing your unsubscribe rates decrease is to remove customers who aren’t engaging with your emails. Try starting with customers who haven’t opened one of your emails in the past 90 days, and gradually increase the time parameters if you’re still experiencing a less-than-favorable number of unsubscribes.
2. Target
We’ve said it before and we’ll continue saying it — target your emails. The days of sending the same exact email to everyone in your database are gone. Sending smarter emails to customers optimized for each person’s individual needs is hands down the best way to get customers engaged and make purchases.
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3. Optimize email send frequency and times
A/B testing different variables in order to send the best emails possible is essential to a great email program. Perhaps some customers unsubscribe because they receive too many emails, or the emails come at inconvenient times. This can easily be reconciled through testing. Consider segmenting based on email frequency or send times, or better yet, both! Once you decide how many emails to send each customer monthly, keep it consistent.
4. Ask for feedback
No matter how your process for allowing customers to opt out of emails is set up, include a short survey asking why the customer is choosing to unsubscribe. Even a simple multiple choice question could provide helpful feedback for you to understand why people want out.
5. Send valuable content
Evaluate the content of your emails. If you’re sending frequent emails with the same messages each time, customers are bound to unsubscribe. Make sure the content you are sending has value for your customers.
6. Personalize
Customers are more likely to engage with emails targeted directly to them. Include their name in the email to make them feel like they are receiving an exclusive email just for them (even if that’s not technically the truth).
7. Offer incentives
Your customers should feel like they are missing out on amazing content, but also amazing deals, if they opt out of your emails. That said, don’t ruin the value of your product or service by overdoing it with the specials. Keep the extreme deals for special occasions, which will keep people subscribed in the hopes that each new email will bring them an offer they can’t refuse.
8. Offer subscription/frequency options
Rather than just having an unsubscribe button, offer options such as monthly newsletters, emails about specific types of products, or sales. Providing the option for the customer to set their personal email frequency or topics of interest is a bonus for them and your business. By allowing them to decide what and how often they want to receive emails — daily, weekly or monthly for example — the chances of them unsubscribing are lowered and you’ll know to only send the emails they’re interested in as often as they said they wanted to be communicated with.
All tips aside, keep in mind that your unsubscribe rate will never be zero. There will always be at least one person to opt out of your emails, and you should be okay with that. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all…or something like that, right?
