You’ve just looked at your reports and it’s confirmed: the unsubscribe rate for your emails is frightening. You notice that it has been steadily increasing for a few months and is becoming more and more worrying.
What are you going to do?
One of the things not to do is ignore it. A high unsubscribe rate can seriously damage your email sender reputation and even impact your deliverability. If the situation has lasted long enough, a high unsubscribe rate can affect your conversion rates and even your revenue.
But you noticed it in time! You are aware that your unsubscribe rate is increasing and you know that you have a role to play in it. But what?
If your contacts are tired of hearing from you by email or are no longer interested in your marketing efforts, you can implement significant changes to improve your readers’ engagement.
Create different segments to be more specific
If your unsubscribe rate continues to increase, perhaps your messages are not relevant enough and are not sent at the right pace for your audience. Studies show that 50% of consumers unsubscribe from an email list because they feel that the message is not relevant. E-commerce shoppers often unsubscribe because they feel the emails become too frequent and spam their inbox. It may be that the message is not particularly targeted and therefore useless to the consumer. It is up to you to make sure that you have never sent emails that led them to unsubscribe.
There is no way to guarantee that your audience is always engaged; however, you can improve your messages by making them more appealing and responsive to their needs. If you work on your email segments, you can then send “tailor-made” and personalized messages according to their interests. With real-time analysis of your contacts’ behavior, you can send emails to segments such as:
- Repeat customers who have purchased more than 3 times
- Contacts who have not converted within 30 days
- Contacts who are interested in a specific product or a specific category
Segmenting can be much more than choosing from demographic data such as age or gender. You can take segmentation further by basing it on data more specific to your contacts’ buying cycle and their actions, thus increasing your chances that your contacts will not unsubscribe. And even though segmentation helps you ensure that your contacts get the most relevant content, it is just as important to make sure they do not get irrelevant content. In fact, with proper segmentation, it is not uncommon to send fewer emails to each contact (these now being more relevant).
Personalize each of your messages
With better segmentation of your audience, you can also use your customer data to personalize every email you send. Studies show that every contact is more responsive to a personalized marketing email. According to McKinsey, personalization can reduce acquisition costs by 50% and increase marketing effectiveness by 30%.
Personalizing an email does not simply mean sending an email with your contact’s name in the subject line (even if sometimes that can be enough). You can also personalize your emails with the data collected about your contacts, such as:
- the last article viewed on your website by your contact
- recommendations for a product your contact is likely to like, based on their purchase history
- a discount on a specific item they put in their cart before abandoning it
These types of email personalization can truly generate results for your emails and provide more relevant messages to your contacts. A simple unsubscribe can represent a 60% loss in value from a long-term perspective. But when emails are personalized, the click-through rate is 2.5 times higher. So make sure to personalize your messages so that your audience feels that your emails have real added value and are not wasting their time.
Leverage multichannel
If your contacts continue to unsubscribe, it may be because you are sending too many emails. If your audience feels that you are sending a flood of emails, they will unsubscribe just to clean up their inbox. In this case, you will have to reduce the number of emails you send. But how are you going to do that without losing engagement and missing out on your crucial customer relationship?
It’s simple: instead of communicating everything by email, try other channels. For example, web and mobile push (notifications) are tools with high conversion rates. Instead of sending transactional emails such as the order confirmation email or informational email, try push messages or Facebook messenger for e-commerce. In this case, instead of sending 5 emails per week to your contacts, you can send 3 and 2 web notifications. You will then be perceived as less intrusive by your contacts, while still communicating the information you wanted to.
Conclusion
Email must be used carefully and cautiously by any company. Even if your contacts have opted in, that does not mean they will never unsubscribe, especially if you abuse their trust. This is all the more true with the implementation of the GDPR, where contacts will have the option to withdraw, delete, or modify their personal information as they wish (directly with you or through a preference center for opt-out).
If you see that your unsubscribe rate is increasing, it may be the right time to reassess the way your company uses email. By combining good segmentation, personalization, and the use of different channels, you can improve the engagement of your emails and control your unsubscribe rate.
