Care about the indifferent, Cheer the naysayer, agree with the disagreeing and accept the rejecting.
Building a database of believers
When we send emails for our clients there is a tendency for them to feel unloved & disappointed when people unsubscribe. We take a different view; people leaving your list should be celebrated.
Unsubscribers are leaving because they’re not interested in your thing anymore, it’s natural. You wouldn’t want a shop full of tyre kickers so why have have an email list with a huge chunk of disinterested recipients.
Unsubscriptions have the effect of honing your list, you’ll be talking to people that want to hear, people that believe in what your doing. The same ego that took a bruising from being rejected can now bask in increased open & click rates. From a practical point of view it can cost less to distribute emails to a smaller list and take less time analysing reports.
It’d be fantastic if you could please all of the people all of the time but until then it’s important to stay focused on your some of the people.
I guess if you’ve arrived here via our email, I should point out that the unsubscribe button is at the bottom of it… I’ll be poised with my party horn.
4 Comments
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Agreed, good point!
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Author
Hi Mark, thanks for taking the time to comment, I think that it is a good analogy for a lot of other marketing devices too. Thanks, Andrew
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Couldn’t agree more, companies should recognize the lasting damage they can do to customer relations through unwanted emails. Marks and Sparks are the most recent example in my personal experience, and big surprise, the ‘unsubscribe’ function kicks me out. I’m tired of trying!
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Hi Nick, interesting point raised, we’ve experienced large companies that have a long winded unsubscribe process or even a process that doesn’t respect the unsubscription. We take this very seriously and have even created a geeky 9 page guide on ‘permissions’ to make sure we’re doing the right thing.
Rules state that an unsubscribe system must be available for 30 days, senders must act on a request within ten business days, for free, it must only require sending a single email, or visiting a single page.
In our opinion more should be done, one click unsubscribe is the system we employ, your point about customer relations is exactly right, recipients will remember that it was a very easy subscribe process, anything less on the unsubscription side feels like a company not listening, or worse, ignoring us.
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