The long goodbye

As a truly spam-free service email marketer, you’ll want to make sure that your subscribers are aware that they will be receiving your emails, and that they look forward to receiving them, because the content of the email benefits them in some way.

That said, we will all come across subscribers who, for some reason or other, no longer wish to receive our newsletters. The key to positive karma in email marketing is to make it as easy as possible to help people get what they’re looking for. If they want to unsubscribe, let them! If they want to update their email address so that they continue receiving newsletters at a new address, let them as well.

I came across this article from our friends at Marketing Profs, and just had to share.

“Contrary to popular belief among marketers,” says a ReturnPath whitepaper, “an unsubscribe request is not necessarily the end of a customer relationship. By executing a well-thought-out, positive unsubscribe experience, a company can extend their brand equity and keep the customer for years to come, even if that customer is no longer an email subscriber.”

To see how well corporations currently manage the opt-out process, ReturnPath unsubscribed from 45 email lists it had previously joined for another study. While most included links to unsubscribe or preference pages in their messages, a few still required recipients to send unsubscribe requests by email. The majority of the companies provided immediate confirmation that an address would be removed from the list. Some even offered the exact date this would take effect.

However, surprisingly few offered anything but a total opt-out: only 2 companies out of the 45 studied offered options for subscribers to change the frequency they received email, or to opt out of just some of the marketers’ emails. And only 11% of companies allowed subscribers to change their email address on the unsubscribe landing page.

Read more here.

Online Outbox makes creating subscription forms simple, and will even give you the html code to place on your website to give your subscribers a seamless experience. Check it out! Login and Create a Website Form.