A new study published by the Chief Marketing Officer Council and and InfoPrint shows that nearly 50% of all unsubscribes were driven by a lack of relevancy.
A study conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and InfoPrint reveals that of the 91 per cent of consumers who opt out or unsubscribe to emails, 46 per cent do so because the messages they receive are simply not relevant.
How are you making your emails relevant?
Politico published an article Sunday looking at the best e-mail lists in politics. Their criteria for choosing the winner focused on list size and recipient engagement, measured by amount of money raised and recipient response to issues. Despite not being a delivery focused article or even mentioning delivery at all, this article is all about delivery.
How can an article be about delivery without ever mentioning the word? By actually looking at the effectiveness of the overall campaign and measuring how the lists actually perform. In the article, Politico used a number of criteria to evaluate different email lists and programs.
“But we only mail people who registered at our website! How can they say we’re spamming?”
In those cases where website registration includes notice that the recipient will be added to a list, and / or the recipient receives an email informing them of the type of email they have agreed to receive there is some permission involved. Without any notice, however, there is no permission. Senders must tell the recipient they should expect to receive mail at the time of registration (or shortly thereafter) otherwise there is not even any pretense of opt-in associated with that registration.
Take, for example, a photographers website. The photographer took photos at a friend’s wedding and put them up on a website for the friend and guests to see. Guests were able to purchase photos directly from the site, if they so desired. In order to control access, the photographer required users to register on the site, including an email address.
None of this is bad. It’s all standard and reasonably good practice.
Unfortunately, the photographer seems to have fallen into the fallacy that everyone who registers at a website wants to receive mail from the website as this morning I received mail from “Kate and Al’s Photos <pictage@pictage.example.com>.” It includes this disclaimer on the bottom:
I tend not to blog too much on subject lines as they are really a marketing issue and a subscriber relationship issue. The subject lines a particular mailer uses should be directed and developed with an eye towards making the mail relevant and useful to the recipient.
What subject lines shouldn’t be is deceptive, either intentionally or inadvertantly. How can a subject line be inadvertantly deceptive? Take this: “Today only! One day sale!” The email in question was a printable coupon to get a discount at a bookstore. Unfortunately, the sales was not “Today” – the day the email was received.
On the one hand, I can sympathize with the sender. Sometimes email takes a while to get delivered, particularly for large mail drops. So you want to send before the mail needs to be in the inbox and in front of the recipient. But, that means that some of your recipients may get the email before “Today.” A much better subject line would have been “Friday only! One day sale!”