Customer retention is one of the most difficult parts for any business across the globe. Marketing teams often find people unsubscribing from their mailing list and there is not direct influence over the same.
Although, by reducing the email unsubscribe rate will give various benefits retaining existing customers, getting more product qualified leads, and even acquiring new customers at a lower CAC (customer acquisition cost).
Additionally, when you successfully reduce your churn rate, you will see increased operating profits in your business. So, before jumping on how you can reduce your email unsubscribe rate, let’s understand the basics first.
What is an unsubscribe rate?
Unsubscribe rate refers to the percentage of subscribers that chose to opt-out from the mailing list once they receive a communication on their email as a part of an email marketing campaign. For instance, if your marketing team sends 1000 emails in a mass-emailing campaign and 10 receivers choose to unsubscribe from the list, you get a 1% unsubscribe rate.
Prospects or customers due to many reasons choose to unsubscribe from the mailing list as they do not find the information provided in the email necessary or they are not liking the brand’s message. Unsubscribing will stop the future sequences of emails from hitting their inbox.
What is a good unsubscribe rate?
Depending on the nature of your business and products & services you are trying to offer in the market, a typical rate less than 1% is considered as a good unsubscribe rate. If you are getting more than 1% unsubscribe rate, then you need to work on your campaigns and list to get fruitful results.
If you are an email marketing pro, then getting less than 0.2% unsubscribe rate will be considered as better than the normal.
How to calculate email unsubscribe rate?
There is a simple formula to calculate email unsubscribe rate. You can simply check the number of successful emails delivered and number of unsubscribes to get the matrix.
The formula to calculate unsubscribe rate is:
Unsubscribe rate = Total number of unsubscribes / Successful emails delivered x 100
Proven tips to reduce email unsubscribe rate
There are various practices in the industry that will allow marketing teams to reduce their unsubscribe rate considerably. And, as we mentioned, there is no one size-fits-all approach in measuring the email unsubscribe rate for your outreach campaign. So, let’s see how we can reduce the number of unsubscribe accounts.
1. Seek Permission From Your Users
If you are planning to run email marketing campaigns for your brand, you should make sure that you are collecting your potential customers’ emails by taking their consent. When prospects sign-up on your subscription box, they should be aware that they should expect your marketing emails. If they don’t want to continue, they can simply unsubscribe or opt-out from the mailing list.
So, it’s better to ask your users to give consent to avoid this from happening in the first place. You can also add an option for taking users consent while sending your first cold-email, so that the recipients can give you permission to send further emails in their inboxes. Though, this will not make sure that the users would not unsubscribe from your email list.
2. Using Double Opt-ins
When you keep a single opt-in for your mailing list, recipients would not need to confirm their submission. They would only fill their email address once and become a part of your mailing list. On the other hand, when you ask them for a double opt-in, they would confirm their subscription through the email. Research suggests, when you put double opt-ins for your recipients, the chances of unsubscription will decrease.
Again, both single and double opt-ins have their own set up upsides and downsides. Many times users skip confirming their email subscription in the second step of double opt-in. You can create a sense of urgency to prevent this from happening.
3. Segment Your Prospects
When you try sending the email content that does not interest your readers, you will not get the desired results for your outreach sequence. Receiving random emails will frustrate users and push them to unsubscribe themselves from your mailing list. So, make sure to segment your users correctly, try to send as relevant content as possible.
When you send relevant and personalized emails to your prospects, they will feel special and see the emails as exclusively crafted for them. This would increase their interest in your products and offerings and thus help you to reduce the unsubscribe rate.
4. Choose Right Email Frequency
Every brand wants their emails to appear on the top of their recipient’s mailbox. Thus, marketing teams end up increasing the number of emails sent to their subscribers. This will make people lose interest and get annoyed as they are bombarded with information.
So, to keep your bond active with the subscribers, it is essential to send emails at the right time of the day and only as frequently as your recipients are expecting to get. This will make your readers give you better open rates and also increase your chances of converting them into your paying customers.
5. Content Matters
Poor quality of email content might make subscribers unsubscribe faster. Quality of the content is one of the biggest factors that will make users take action. When you are creating content for your emails, you should segment your target audience and send email that address the customers pain point. For instance, content for daily newsletter will be very different from product announcement emails or holiday discount emails.
To grab the attention of the recipients, simply be consistent with your content and make it easy to read for users.
6. Use Better Subject Lines
Good subject lines will bring better CTR (click-through rates)and Open rates for senders. Majority of the successful email marketing agencies and marketers make sure that they give subject lines top priority. Do not try to misguide your readers, so that they open your email .
Make sure to draft a subject line guides the recipients about the information in your email. When your recipients find your email message genuine, they will trust you and further engage with you.
7. Personalization is a Must
As mentioned above in the content and subject line part, an added layer of personalization is like cherry on the pie. It not only boosts your open rate but also strengthen your bond with your recipient. Many think that mentioning the recipient’s first name will be sufficient for the same. But, in reality, mentioning a person’s job profile, position, and interests might work better.
Personalization at a scale is not possible with manual efforts. SendBuzz also provides an option to run A/B tests for content and email lists. So, you can test what type of personalization works best for you.
8. Always Optimize for Mobile
Email recipients including corporate clients check their email on their smartphones while on the move. So, if you are running an important email outreach campaign, make sure to optimize the content for every device and every reader.
Readers should not unsubscribe to you just because they are not able to interact or read your emails on their mobile devices. Faster loading speeds and performance will also help your users experience the communication better.
9. Check Spammy Words
Not hitting your prospect’s inbox is as good as getting unsubscribe from someone’s contact list. So, if you are trying to run impactful campaigns that bring good ROI for you – always make sure to not include any type of spammy words in your emails.
When you use spammy text in your email marketing campaign, you might get short term results, but at the same time, you are losing long term trust from your prospects.
10. Don’t Miss Your Outreach Schedule
With the defined email sending schedule, you can plan your content in advance and make sure to hit the inbox with. This way, the likelihood of getting unsubscribed by your recipients will go down as you are not surprising them with random, clunky messages.
So, fix a schedule that is both suitable for your content team and your recipients to get the best traction possible.
11. Give Offers and Insights
Try to offer exclusive offers to your subscribers to keep them engaged and subscribed to you. If you provide exclusive deals to your subscribers and give them VIP access to your products, they will keep receiving your emails just for the sake of waiting to make the final buying decision.
12. Give Alternate Communication Channels
As the communication channels are increasing. Users are engaging with the brands and their representatives across social media channels, phone calls, text messages, and even on AI powered chats. So, if you are planning to get better ROI from your email marketing campaigns, you should always try to include your social media handles, an option to book a sales call, SMS, or your intuitive blogs.
These were the proven steps that will help you reduce the email unsubscribe rate from your users and help you achieve better results for your business and operations.
Why do people choose to unsubscribe from mailing lists?
There could be various reasons that will inspire users to unsubscribe your mailing lists. Here are some of the primary reasons for the same.
Prospects subscribe to you just for offers
There are high chances that your customers will subscribe to you in order to get some benefits or offers on your products or services. Once they get the benefits, they might end up unsubscribing to you.
This is also good for brands, as they will be able to remove the connections who are not further interested in paying for the products and services they are offering to their customers.
Your segmentation is wrong
It is a great practice to keep the contact list quality top notch. This will help you to deliver more emails to inbox and increase the chances of keeping people subscribed to your email list and reading your emails as well.
That is the reason why you should consider sending emails in small pockets rather than sending emails in a huge list. Try to create small lists with proper segments and personalize your text for the same.
You are sending low quality content
Content plays a crucial role in email outreach. If you start sending random emails with low content quality, there are chances that your recipients will start unsubscribing you.
Make sure to keep the content quality top notch and stick to the niche you are targeting plus creating content for. Many times, prospects take time to convert as they need more follow ups, rather than new stories from your product marketing team.
Your email frequency is too high
Sending too many emails that hit inboxes will annoy your audience. Try to set an email frequency that is both comfortable for your recipients and provides ample insights that will help them.
At the same time, do not send emails with low frequency that your subscribers forget about you and start unsubscribing to your list.
Your emails are reaching spam folders
Once your emails reach the spam folder for your recipients, your recipients will most likely start considering you as an unsolicited company. To stay away from spam-folders, make sure to warm your inboxes properly before running any campaigns.
If the above reasons are kept in mind, then this will have a positive impact on your subscription list.
Can email unsubscription benefit you?
Marketers and brands might think that unsubscribed addresses will not give any benefits. And might end up spoiling your brand name. But, here are the positive points that can happen with you if your brand is getting unsubscribers.
Improved email deliverability
When recipients unsubscribe to your mailing lists, you will be able to achieve fewer spam reports for your campaigns. That is a great sign if you are regularly sending email messages to your lists.
On top of that, these unsubscribed users will free up more space for the people who are actually interested in getting marketing communications from your brand or organization.
An opportunity to improve content and offerings
Unsubscribed users means they are not happy with your emails and style of outreach. The reason could be poor email list segmentation or could be thin quality of content.
Therefore, this could give you opportunity to improve your content in the email or make your offering better than the current campaigns you are typing to send.
Improvement in your email list
No matter how hard you are trying to establish connection with your business connections and drive sales with them, there are chances of disconnect in the communication at various stages. When a prospect is not ready to move ahead in the sales cycle, you can simply make sure to remove them from one segment to another.
This will not only save time for your sales team to engage with them with right messaging, the recipients will also start getting more relevant information in their inboxes.
Ability to gather insights that matters
Conducting a short survey will help you generate valuable insights. Campaign insights will help you discover why your prospects are planning to leave. Also, users who are not really interested in your brand will quit your campaigns and mailing list, giving you a broader opportunity to retain the recipients that matter the most.
Is high email unsubscribe rate a reason to worry?
Keeping the email unsubscribe rate in check is a great way to amplify your marketing efforts and generate more revenue for your company. Though, you should also track who unsubscribed to you and see if it is worrisome for your brand or not.
Typically, providing an unsubscription option in your mail also works as your email list filtering. This way you will be able to hit more inboxes and reduce the chances of getting spam reports on your emails.
Get ready to bring your unsubscribe rate down!
Increase the ROI by reducing churn rate by using the practices mentioned above. Apply them continuously and consistently while running your campaigns to filter useful contacts faster.
Serve your readers valuable and insightful content, so that they engage with your emails without leaving your lists. Aim at the challenges they are facing and offer the solutions that your products are giving.
Frequently Asked Questions
Unsubscribe rate refers to the percentage of the number of users who chose to opt-out from your email list. If you send 1000 emails to individual users and 10 of them unsubscribe from the list, your unsubscribe rate will be 1%.
If your campaign gets less than 2% unsubscribe rates, it will be considered as a healthy email bounce rate.
To calculate email unsubscribe rates, you need to divide the number of unsubscribers by the total successful emails delivered via your email campaign.