Email marketing: how to tempt back the emotionally unsubscribed

Statistics vary, but anywhere between 10% to 50% of your email subscriber list can be considered emotionally unsubscribed. Here are some ways you could win them back.

Shameless ego pandering? Free back-rubs? ALL CAPS PLEADING? Let’s take a look at the right course of action when you feel like somebody isn’t paying you enough attention.

Oh I know… Provocative poo-shaped emojis!

topman emoji

The emotionally unsubscribed

First let’s talk about churn rate. Also known as attrition, the churn rate is the percentage of email subscribers who leave your list in a specific period of time.

There are two types of churn…

  • Transparent churn: these are the people who physically unsubscribe from your emails or who click the spam button. This also includes hard bounces (permanent reasons why the email can’t be delivered, i.e. email address doesn’t exist or filled-in incorrectly).
  • Opaque churn: people who receive your emails but ignore them (the ‘emotionally unsubscribed’) or who don’t see them because they’re filtered off into a junk folder or promotions tab.

It’s this second group of people we’ll concentrate on here. The ones who didn’t just give up immediately when the relationship got to difficult, but the ones who became bored, distant and emotionally unavailable. Staring listless at your morning coffee while I tell you all about the dream I had last night where I met Shirley MacLaine and we went rock-climbing.

If they don’t care, why should I?

Statistics vary, but anywhere between 10% to 50% of your email subscriber list can be considered emotionally unsubscribed. You could consider it a waste of time and resources to continue marketing to them, and perhaps they should be culled from your list to make way for new contacts.

But then again…

I personally receive four or five emails a week from my favourite London based fancy-pants cinema, but annually I open maybe only 2% of them. However when I do open one, it tends to lead to either a large bulk buy of festival tickets or a membership renewal. I would consider myself a valuable addition to their email list, and I rely on their regular emails to remind me about specific annual events.

For your business, perhaps the emotionally unsubscribed recipient just doesn’t need you yet. They may have initially signed up for your emails and although they haven’t interacted with them for 12 months, they have still yet to click unsubscribe. The reason for this may well be more positive then because it’s disappearing into an unused folder.

Perhaps it’s easier to ignore your messages until the right one comes along, rather than unsubscribing and having to remember a URL or search for your service at a later date. That is if they even remember who you are.

How you can win them back

There are myriad reasons why someone isn’t opening your emails, so for the purpose of this, let’s assume it’s because you just haven’t sent them anything interesting enough yet. How are you going to grab their attention?

Test frequency

Maybe you’re sending too many emails. The sheer volume of your communication can act like a very bland wallpaper in their inbox; easy to ignore, but perhaps noticeable if it was removed completely.

By sending just a one email only once in a while, you may end up provoking more of a response. “Oh I haven’t heard from them for a while” and your more judicious, tolerable frequency may be noted as being an improvement.

Email subscribers should be asked for their frequency preferences on sign-up, but this could also form part of a re-engagement campaign. “Tell us how much you’d like to hear from us in the future” may work as a subject line.

Try a genuinely brilliant offer

Go big on a generous discount offer, one that’s exclusive to the recipient and time sensitive. Make sure they know this in the subject line.

You should also offer a discount on goods that are entirely relevant to the recipient. For instance something from their wishlist, or browsing/purchasing history.

Get better at segmenting

Perhaps you’re being too broad in your scope, sending one marketing email for all customers, even though your market is far more varied.

I’ve had plenty of emails from Gap covering everything from maternity wear, to men’s slacks to children’s wellingtons. If it segmented its subscribers into more accurate sub-sets I probably wouldn’t have emotionally checked-out and be talking about how rubbish its emails are right now.

gap_emails

Try personalisation

Maybe if you don’t use a recipient’s name in your emails, perhaps give it a go. But don’t be too creepy and certainly make sure that you don’t automatically use ‘Hi [insert name]’ to begin with.

Make sure your emails work on mobile

The majority of smartphone users check their emails on their phones, and mobile now makes up the majority of email opens at 51%. If your emails are not optimised across devices, your emails are super hard to read and will be ignored.

Use on-site communication

If you are using cookies to detect a website visitor who is not engaged by email, you could use pop-up message on-site that asks them for a new email address or to change their email preferences.

Make the ability to unsubscribe clearer and easier

There is a legal requirement to include the ability to unsubscribe in every marketing email. It doesn’t matter where it is in the email, but if you put your ‘unsubscribe’ button at the top in an obvious CTA then there’s less of a chance the unhappy recipient will mark it as spam, which can be a black mark against your reputation.

music magpie email

Offer communication preferences when unsubscribing

Unsubscribing needs to be a one-click process, but on the same page you could offer different email preferences.

Many subscribers can be convinced to stay subscribed if they’re given the option to change their preferred topics, frequencies or types of offer.

There’s less of a chance that the subscriber will opt out of all communications and more chance of them just varying their selection.

However…

If you don’t manage to win them back after a reasonable period of time, you should just remove them from your database altogether, otherwise this will have a negative effect on your performance metrics.

Sometimes, you just have to make a clean break. They’ll understand if they have to sleep on the sofa tonight.

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