Why Is Your Audience Hitting “Unsubscribe”?
Email practices that lose subscribers.
Don’t let the naysayers fool you: Email marketing is still alive and quite well, thanks to the fact that it offers the highest ROI (66%) among the digital marketing channels that businesses commonly use. And while this is great news for your profit margins, email marketing plays a much bigger role in connecting with your customer base and building trust – a surefire conversion strategy.
Why Email Marketing Is Still Important
Beyond the dollar bills, email marketing can go a long way towards building value in the products and services you offer, convincing readers to take action and engage with your email content. Depending on your specific business goals, this engagement could look like a number of things, including visits to your website, shopping trips to your physical location, or booking an appointment for your services.
Email marketing serves as a support and extension of your other digital marketing channels and should be consistent with the other marketing and branding messages your business is sending. Once your email subscribers can trust that you’re the best solution for their problem, they’ll give you their loyalty. This also means they’ll be writing online reviews about your business, telling their friends and family all about it, and continue to choose your products and brands over the competition.
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Grab a Free Copy of My Book, The Trust Equation, Here.
Email Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
There’s one caveat here, however: Not all email is good email. It’s easy to convince people to sign up for your email list if they already know your brand, but it’s a bit more challenging to keep them subscribed. Your email subscriber list is a reflection of your overall customer retention efforts, and simply slapping together a weekly email and crossing your fingers could actually cost you subscribers. Here are some of the common email marketing mistakes you should avoid to grow your email subscriber list (and your bottom line.)
Not Personalizing Email Marketing Content
Now more than ever, customers are hyper aware of brand authenticity. If you’re sending one-size-fits-all marketing messages, your email subscribers will definitely notice. Your audience can be segmented based on a number of factors, including where they are in the sales funnel. By sending out the right content at the right point in their journey and highlighting the value of your products or services at different stages, they’re much more likely to engage and convert instead of walking away from your email subscriber list for good.
Not Offering Flexibility
Why should “unsubscribe” be the only option? What if your email subscribers could change the frequency of the emails you send them? Maybe they’d rather use social media, are you supplying the links to these assets in your email? Make sure that you offer alternative options that don’t include unsubscribing so that customers can still stay connected.
Not Investing In Re-reEngagement
Email subscribers who never open your email marketing campaigns will likely unsubscribe eventually. Re Engagement strategies should be deployed before that happens, when you first notice that there’s a segment of your email subscriber list that’s simply not opening your messages. Using a tool like Connect 365 that helps you create re-engagement campaigns and automates the lead nurturing process can help. Our email automation software allows you to create multi-touchpoint sales follow up campaigns to keep your name in front of your leads for the long haul, keeping email subscribers engaged.
Not Asking For Feedback
There are some email subscribers that are bent on unsubscribing, and that’s fine – but you need to know why they made that choice (especially if you’re offing other options.) You can use a simple survey when they click to unsubscribe for some insight on how to tweak your email marketing campaigns and more about the email engagement habits of your customer base. Don’t overcomplicate things here though; if they really truly want to unsubscribe you should make it easy for them.
How Can We Help?
If you’re thinking about you unsubscribe rate and breaking out into a cold sweat thinking about how to change it, don’t panic just yet. Our email automation software can help mitigate many of the challenges that push email subscribers to unsubscribe and allow you to focus on sending personalized email marketing content that converts.
We also make it easy to offer options to email subscribers that you still nurture as leads. A great example: If someone wants to unsubscribe from specific content, they can do that by opting out of a specific sequence of emails, vs all future emails. It could look something like this:
And in Connect 365, that looks like using Advanced Actions and removing that person from the tag that added them into the sequence of emails:
Show off your expertise and quickly build trust with personal sales follow up emails that they will actually see, read, and respond to – every follow up email looks exactly like it was manually typed out and sent directly to your prospect from you.
Your Turn: How to Get Clients With Email
So, to sum up your goal to increase your email deliverability here is to do everything you can to build trust with the right prospects, including writing emails with content that’s relevant to your prospect (and that avoids sounding spammy) and to use the right tools for what you want to do.
