I recently found myself walking a fine line between generating solid business growth through email marketing and hearing from a few customers that said they were getting too many emails. Like most anything, finding the right balance is key to achieving business goals without annoying or angering your customers.
But what is that right balance? How do you define “too much?” This survey tells us that the primary culprit of unsubscribes is frequency.
In this week's blog, we'll cover the three biggest signs that you may be annoying your customers:
1. Increase in the Number of Unsubscribes
An increase in unsubscribes is a good first indication that your customers feel like they are getting too much communication from you.
Having folks unsubscribe from your emails is not unusual. I’ve found that often times, the biggest reason this occurs has nothing to do with the number of communications – it usually has to do with the relevancy of what you are offering and how it applies to your customer on the individual level.
If you’ve taken your email campaigns up a notch and you are seeing a higher rate of unsubscribes, your audience may be telling you something. Here's what you can do:
Consider scaling back and seeing if that has any effect.
Make sure that your subscriber list has a set of options as to what content they want to see from you. This is usually referred to as a preference center.
Empower your customers with choice. If you are pushing a new product, and some customers are not interested in it, there should be an option to give customers the choice of what content they want to see from you.
If unsubscribing is the only option, then your customer only has two choices: keep receiving more emails than they want, or unsubscribe.
2. Customer Complaints
It is unlikely that a customer will seek you out to complain about the number of emails they are receiving if they cannot simply reply to your email campaign. However, if they make the effort to do so – that should tell you that they are bothered. I think it is fair to say that this may be a warning sign of a larger problem and whomever is complaining is actually doing you a favor.
First and foremost, take the feedback and help your customer. Direct them to opting out of specific topic areas before unsubscribing completely.
3. Decrease in Engagement
No surprise - you may notice that as your email frequency has kicked up a notch, overall engagement and open rates may go down.
So what can you do?
There isn’t a single solution to finding the right balance. It depends entirely on your business, the product or service, and the customer.
The best thing you can do is test the frequency of your marketing campaigns and measure.
Give customers the option to not receive emails for a specified amount of time without completely unsubscribing. This option that can be enabled within your preference center.
Need help with your email marketing campaigns? At KJM Digital, we can help you develop the right key messages for your audience, and help find the right balance in your email marketing campaigns.
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