Why email marketing unsubscribers aren't always a bad thing

Written by Carly Snider | 10/20/15 3:12 PM

But you know what, we’re not mad, in fact, we’re not even worried about it. When people unsubscribe from your emails, it can be a good thing for your business and for your marketing strategy. Last week, we decided to round out our marketing strategy and introduce a new weekly email marketing campaign. We packed it full of great design, valuable content, and introduced our newest tools and then we pressed send. After that, we sat back and watched as person after person hit unsubscribe.

Unsubscribers clean up your list

You want the highest quality list possible when running an email campaign; you want engaged readers who you can delight and close over and over again with your content and products.

This is why unsubscribers can be great because they clean up your list to ensure that you are marketing to those who are truly interested.

On the other side, this is important to your reputation as well, the risk of being branded as a spammer is worse than any unsubscribe.

Unsubscribers give you perspective

While our strategy is new, as it builds out over time there will be other unsubscribers and there will be new subscribers. The way that those unsubscribers interact with our email will tell us a lot about our value to them, our relevancy and our timing.  

You can view their history with your emails to understand how you became irrelevant over time.

Chances are the people who unsubscribed to our first weekly email were people that are no longer interested in engaging with our brand. But we now have a list of people who want to interact with us and learn more from us, which is EXACTLY what we want. We can now focus on fine tuning our content for those people and we can make smart decisions about our future emails based on their interaction with that first email.  

How to optimize your email subscriber set up 

We have some tricks that can help you build a high quality subscriber list. Those tricks are all in optimizing your subscriber set up. Give your subscribers options of what kind of content they want and the frequency they want that content during their sign-up. This will tell you exactly how you should be interacting with that person.

Next time an email goes out and your subscriber list declines, don't worry about it too much, there are positive outcomes from that action. Another way to ensure that people stay tuned into your emails is to make sure they look great and have quality content, learn more about that here.