Engagement Intervention – Converting Potential Email Unsubscribes

May 6th, 2010,  Katarzyna Grochowska – GetResponse

Do you think of disengaged subscribers as an unavoidable loss – or a business opportunity? Do you try to find the causes and perhaps offer ways of re-engaging your subscribers? Or does the whole process depress and annoy you?!

If you keep getting the same poor responses from certain subscribers, you can either write them off ? or take a couple of easy steps to see if you can reel them back in. Now we’re not talking about the non-responders, but only about the “on the fence” folks that are clearly not thrilled with something about your email marketing strategy!

So let’s look at the unsubscribe scenario from a “cause and effect” perspective to see if there’s any room for intervention – without annoying subscribers to the point that they flag your messages as SPAM.

Why do people unsubscribe?

According to recent email study (1), the top 5 reasons people unsubscribe are:

1.    67% – Irrelevant content
2.    64% – Receive too frequently
3.    50% – Think their email address is being shared or sold
4.    48% – Don’t recall signing up
5.    32% – Privacy concerns

The top 2 reasons are irrelevant content and frequency issues. We’ve discussed the importance of relevance many times on our blog, and we know you’re working hard to improve in this area. But have you ever thought about addressing these issues before the “disengaged” actually unsubscribe?

Would you help them re-engage if we told you it would only take a few minutes of your time?

Read the rest of this post on the GetResponse Blog