2012 is here, I, like many, will be thinking about customer retention. You don’t want your customers to have to unsubscribe from your emails.
Once a consumer unsubscribes from an email, the majority will not re-subscribe. Admittedly, unsubscribing from email lists per se would not make the top 10 list of resolutions, but enough people have the will to un-clutter their lives and get organised. And this can translate into reassessing which brands they engage with.
Here are some top tips on how to stop people unsubscribing in the first place. And, if they do, I’ll show you how to make it a positive consumer experience and take back control of the unsubscribe process.
1. Be relevant
The first and most obvious tactic is to make your ongoing email communications the most relevant you can. The more engaged your consumers are, the less likely they are to unsubscribe from your emails. The focus for this article is not around how to achieve this, but just to highlight one of my best pieces of advice when it comes to developing relevancy. As my American colleagues say “don’t try and boil the ocean any small steps you can make will improve relevancy and make a difference”.
2. Listen
Make sure you remember that email is there to help foster a relationship and all good relationships are about listening to the other person. Demonstratively acting on the information a consumer gives you, be it on frequency of email or type of offers, will make your consumers feel more engaged with the brand and email programme.
3. Sell the benefits
One best practice that brings great results when subscribing consumers is to clearly articulate the benefits of subscription. This messaging should continue, especially as those benefits should change over time as you refine the programme. So make sure your consumers know what those benefits are
4. Manage your email subscriptions
Creation of a subscription management page (SMP) also acts as a powerful tool in reducing unsubscribes for a variety of reasons.
The SMP page gives the consumer an easy place to update information. At its simplest (for example, a change of address) there are numerous stories of customers unsubscribing because they had changed email address and not seen an easy way to update. The other mainstay of the SMP page is allowing you to collect preference information that can then be used to make the content more relevant
5. Be flexible
Try offering changes in frequency. If the buying cycle for a product or service is infrequent, a monthly communication may be too much but quarterly would be more appropriate. Remember that the consumer will only be engaged with five to 10 brands at any one time. So, unless you happen to be an Apple or an Amazon, the chances are your consumers engagement will wax and wane over time. However, if there is still an ongoing periodic engagement, then you have a much greater chance to interact when the time is right for the consumer.
6. Respect people’s channel preference
Brands need to collect and understand their customers’ channel preference. I am a firm believer in the effectiveness of email and, as reports such as the DMA email benchmarking report H2 2010 http://www.dma.org.uk/toolkit/national-email-benchmarking-report-h2-2010 show, email is a powerful and relevant medium. Your consumers, however, live in a multichannel world so if they’d rather hear from you via social or mobile then you should be aware of this and act upon it. Again, having an ongoing relationship means you still have the opportunity to get them engaged with the email channel at a later date.
However it should also be understood that whatever options and data you collect make sure that this is used to enhance the consumers’ experience so that they feel there was value in giving up that information in the first place.
7. Take control of unsubscribe process
Make it easy for your consumer to unsubscribe and help reclaim the process from the spammer. This may sound counter-intuitive but consumer engagement is built on trust. Obviously, having a robust unsubscribe process is essential but so is making it clear in each email where people have to click to unsubscribe. And, of course, I would make it just as easy to change address!
Also if, for whatever reasons, your unsubscribe process is not going to be instant then make sure you manage the consumers’ expectations. Explain that it may take a few days and that they may receive an email in the interim.
8. Inspire trust with your unsubscribe process
Consumers have become increasingly wary of using the unsubscribe button because it was the way that spammers could confirm a real email address and creating distrust for all. As responsible marketers, we have a vested interest in being transparent and honouring expectations not only for the success of individual email programmes but for the overall health of the channel.
9. Use unsubscribe as a listening opportunity
If the consumer does decide to unsubscribe use this as an information/ listening opportunity, ask them why they are leaving. This information can then be used to better develop the programme. Done sensitively, asking why is not obstructive and also has the added benefit of helping stop unwanted unsubscribes. There have been numerous occasions we get requests from clients asking us to re-subscribe a customer because they were just clicking the links to make sure they could unsubscribe if they actually wanted to.
10. Avoid the spam button
Taking back control of the unsubscribe process is also important from two aspects. For many years, there was a trend for people not to unsubscribe but to hit this is spam button even though at some point there had been a genuine opt-in. With the increase of reputational deliverability filtering this can have a negative effect for the rest of your consumer programme and have a detrimental effect on the overall programme. Also the rise of functions such as the Yahoo unsubscribe folder – do away with the ‘this is spam issue’ but you lose the opportunity to understand why or to offer the frequency or channel options discussed above. So make sure you keep control of your unsubscribe process
CFL have the knowledge and experience to build a custom email campaign for your business - please email philm@cflmarketing.co.uk for some examples or call us on 01225 782669
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