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For Your Small Business Liviu Tanase February 21, 2024

The No. 1 Reason People Unsubscribe from Your Emails

Think sending yet another email will get you more sales? You might want to think again.

Seeing someone unsubscribe from your emails can be disheartening. But you know it’s natural. Your subscribers may be trying to clean their inboxes or perhaps they don’t need your content anymore. But if your unsubscribe rate has been consistently high, you may be sending too many emails.

Forty-four percent of people cite excessive emailing frequency as the primary reason they unsubscribe from an email list, according to a new ZeroBounce report. These other common reasons are also worth noting:

  • 19 percent of people stated they unsubscribe because the sender never asked permission to email them.
  • 17 percent of ZeroBounce’s survey respondents said they leave an email list if the content is no longer relevant to them.

But how do you know when it’s time to reconsider your email marketing approach? First, it helps to use some benchmarks. The average email unsubscribe rate is 0.26 percent. Compare your metrics to this standard to see how you stack up. To get the full picture, look at your stats from the past three to six months for any unusual patterns.

How to know if you’re sending too many emails

To determine if you’re emailing your subscribers too often, it’s best to look at your overall metrics. Aside from a high unsubscribe rate, you may also experience:

  • Low open and click rates. People can’t keep up with the number of emails you send, so they just ignore them or delete them altogether.
  • High spam complaint rates. Even if they signed up, people will get irritated if they get too many emails and they’ll report them as spam.
  • Direct feedback. When subscribers reply to tell you they’re tired of hearing from you, think of it as a positive-;it’s a sign they care about your emails, they just don’t want them that often.

Your email marketing metrics give you even more data to help you improve. Here are a few other aspects to consider when analyzing your subscribers’ behavior.

What types of emails cause the most people to leave?

Using this filter to break down your metrics can give you helpful insights. For instance, an educational newsletter may get fewer unsubscribes than a sales email. If the discrepancy is dramatic, reassess your sales email strategy.

Also, if a welcome email gets high open rates but also many unsubscribes, people may be signing up just for a discount or a free offer. Think of new ways to attract them and keep them on your list.

What subject lines work best?

Did you know that people can now unsubscribe from your emails without even opening them? This recent Google and Yahoo update adds more weight to your subject lines, so they have to pique your recipients’ curiosity right away.

To see what your audience likes and dislikes, make a list of the emails that got the least unsubscribes. What were their subject lines? How long were they? Did you use emojis? Double down on the tactics that worked.

Bonus: Let people know how often they’ll get your emails

Being upfront about your email frequency helps you get fewer unsubscribes. So, on your sign-up forms, consider mentioning how often you’re planning to reach out. If you send daily emails, put that in your copy. When people know what to expect, they’re more likely to engage when you show up in their inboxes.

 

This article was written by Liviu Tanase from Inc. and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.

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