Email remains a strong driver of marketing mileage. With email, you have a way of distributing your content, ads, and promotional updates straight into your customers’ inbox. Since the open rate of email is quite high at 46% on mobile, you’re sure that people are made aware of your marketing messages.
Email also has a tangible impact on your business, acting as the biggest source of return on investment (ROI) according to 59% of marketers.
Although there’s a such thing as a healthy unsubscribe rate, you may be missing on an opportunity to make the most out of email marketing whenever someone opts out of your email list. As such, you must avoid sending emails that look spammy or sound too hard sell.
In order for your email campaigns to have less of the unsubscribes and more of the positive results you want, your email list hygiene needs to be in good shape. This means your email data should always be updated, complete, and accurate so your emails can target the right people and keep them in your list.
We recommend these steps for keeping your email list hygiene in check to prevent your followers from unsubscribing:
People in your email list have different preferences and belong to different demographics, which makes segmentation helpful in delivering the right type of content to your subscribers.
A good practice is to segment your subscribers immediately after they have signed up for your newsletter. Ask them right then and there about the goals or challenges they’re experiencing, and make sure that your emails focus on solutions around these problems moving forward. This way, your subscribers will happily look forward to your emails, which have become a great source of amazing ideas.
Email segmentation must also be closely tied to lead nurturing, wherein you continuously keep track of customers’ behavior to enable you to learn more about them.
Once you notice a pattern in someone’s online activity, use it as an opportunity to deliver hyper-personalized emails that align with that person’s stage in the buying cycle.
Aside from giving your subscribers the power to choose what type of content they want to receive; you should also let them choose how much of that content should be sent to them.
Whether your customers want to receive daily or weekly content from you, make sure that you deliver it to them within the timeframe that they asked you to. It’s a good way of managing expectations and cultivating relationships with customers.
This option can also help in your last-ditch effort to keep subscribers from leaving your mailing list. Instead of deleting recipients who have reached your unsubscribe link, send them a final offer to receive emails less frequently—and hope that they have a change of heart.
The “2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America” from the Content Marketing Institute reveals that 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content.
Given this situation, it’s very likely that people in your email list are receiving too many emails, which can be frustrating for them especially if they don’t load well on mobile.
Since traffic from mobile devices continues to overtake desktop browsing, you’ll need to optimize your emails for mobile viewing. With fast-loading emails that have a neat layout and clear images, opting out could be the furthest thing from the mind of your subscribers.
Social media is another channel where you can re-engage people in your mailing list. Make sure that your unsubscribe page contains links to your social media pages, so people can still follow you using their favorite platforms.
Customers are most receptive to exclusive offers, including not only discounts or promotions but also exclusive content. The trick is to convey a feeling of preferential and personalized treatment for being a valuable customer of your company.
Here are sample exclusive offers that can motivate subscribers to stay in your email list.
As you continue to collect information about who your customers are and what their interests are, you can now come up with a solid content marketing plan. This is important since 21% of consumers will choose to unsubscribe if they feel that your content isn’t helpful or relevant.
Look through your email lists and then plan the types of content that you’ll be offering for each segment. For example, it might not be wise to send long-form content to customers who have just signed up for your newsletter, but this type of content may be more appealing to subscribers who have already advanced to the evaluation stage of the buying cycle.
Email marketing is a crowded space, but it can boost your digital marketing campaigns if you know how to do email list hygiene right. With healthy, accurate, and updated email lists, it will be easier for you to drive response and engagement from your customers as they stick it out with you through the buyer’s journey.
Manage your email lists through data cleansing! Get in touch with our email marketing team at Connext Digital!
