To echo the previous article “5 Tips to increase Opt-in of Email Marketing”, Katherine Swarts shares her idea about “5 Tips to reduce Opt-out of Email Marketing”:
It’s tempting to measure e-marketing success — whether the marketing involves e-newsletters/blogs, announcements of upcoming events, or direct invitations to purchase — by the number of people who opt into your mailing list. But if new opt-ins don’t like what they get, they may opt back out just as quickly, leaving you with no net gain in either participation or profit.
Here are five ways to keep them once you catch them.
1. Make sure that messages are interesting to the recipients, not simply to you.
Everyone’s favorite topic of conversation is oneself, and it’s easy to forget that others are not nearly as interested in you as you are, especially not when they have themselves to think about.
Consider:
Am I offering the reader something s/he can benefit by acting on?
or do I sound interested only in myself and what I hope to get?
Am I talking too much about technical aspects of my business that have little direct relevance to customers?
2. Don’t keep re-sending an ad or invitation to boxes that don’t respond.
This drives uninterested recipients crazy. In e-marketing, total lack of response is the equivalent of “no, thank you,” and receiving the same message again is tantamount to being hounded with “Oh, come on, are you sure? Are you sure?”
3. Include a “yes or no” option on any invitations you send.
This will allow you to follow Tip #2 while worrying less about your mailings being lost in cyberspace. And while many uninterested recipients will still ignore your message completely, your implied willingness to take “no” for an answer will be appreciated. If you include a politely worded “Why not?” response option for the refusals, this approach will also double as an easy market survey.
4. Even if this is primarily a marketing list, don’t think that every message has to sell something.
An occasional “fun fact” or “hints and tips” article related to your field of expertise tells people that you’re interested in their needs, not simply their money.
5. Make messages short enough that recipients have to click down only once (at most) to reach the end.
Business e-mails that take longer than two or three minutes to read will soon have people thinking “this takes too much of my work time.” For the same reason, keep the message header short—no long titles, no eight-line descriptions of your business, and especially no list of other recipients!
It may not be as easily measurable as number of recipients, but the true indicator of e-marketing success is when people actually look forward to your mailings. To achieve that goal, do to recipients as you would have others do to you!
By Katherine Swarts from Spread the Word Commercial Writing
Email Marketing email opt-in, email opt-out
