Best Practices For Unsubscribing

mediapost.com – JOHN ENGLER OF UNSUBCENTRAL HAD some great comments based on my article last week and the problems I was having unsubscribing from a newsletter. I’m providing them verbatim with his permission:

1. Marketers should make it clear and easy for people to unsubscribe. The only truly acceptable method for unsubscribing is to offer a link to a Web page with this text: “Click Here to Unsubscribe.” Anything else puts too much onus on the recipient and will likely compel the recipient to hit the “report spam” button in his or her email client. Also, recipients should not need to log in, recall an account number, or type in a password in order to unsubscribe. One best practice to reduce recipient pain is to include the email address in the unsubscribe link, allowing the unsubscribe form to automatically accept the request with one click. Another alternative is to offer just one form item on the unsubscribe page, and allow users to enter their email address and click a button to unsubscribe. I understand per your fellow columnist Loren McDonald’s recent best practice story, some recipients are simply trying to change their preferences. It’s a good point, so put that link on the unsubscribe page. This response is tailored around the folks that truly wish to end communications with the sender.

2. Process the unsubscribe request instantly. CAN-SPAM may allow marketers to fulfill unsubscribe requests within 10 days, but users expect it to happen faster, aren’t likely to know about the 10-day rule and, quite frankly, don’t care — why should they? So, wait if you must but understand that you do so at the expense of your fine brand and will likely upset quite a few members that might just return if you treat them well. Our experience is that consumers who continue to receive mail after they’ve unsubscribed, even if that unsubscribe was yesterday or the day before, just don’t accept that. If you send mail to someone who doesn’t want it, they’ll rightfully perceive you as a spammer. This may compel them to simply hit the “report spam” button — which could affect your deliverability in the future or worse, lead to escalated action.

3. Offer options. Some companies only offer an email-based unsubscribe options (for example, “Reply to this message with ‘Unsubscribe’ in the subject line”) and some only offer Web-based unsubscribes (example: “click here to unsubscribe”). The best marketers offers users both methods, and they test each method to make sure they work reliably. Users that are on mobile devices may only be able to reply to your email. Users that have email forwarded from another account may only be able to click a link to a Web page. Marketers should allow both options all the time.

4. Link to your privacy policy in your email. The best marketers will also include a link to their privacy policy and, if practical, include a phone number to call to unsubscribe if all other methods are failing for the user. A physical address is required by CAN-SPAM, so make sure you’re checking that physical address for unsubscribe requests too.

5. Respect the unsubscribe request. CAN-SPAM requires you to opt out users from all commercial email when they request it. So, if bob@yahoo.com unsubscribes from your newsletter, there’s a good chance that he doesn’t want to receive an unsolicited email from your sales reps, or another department. The law requires you to honor that request. A best practice would be to offer multiple options on the opt-out page (like MediaPost does on its account management page), so you can make sure you’re respecting your users’ wishes. If you don’t offer multiple options, then the smartest thing to do is just accept the request across your entire company until you get another request for communication from that user.

To summarize: Make it easy for people to unsubscribe instantly using whatever method they want, and tell them where to go if they just can’t unsubscribe. Doing that will help you with the law, as well as help you build your brand’s credibility with your users.

Leverage Your Unsubscribes

mediapost.com – A recent In-Box Insiders discussion was whether a click on the unsubscribe link in an email should be included in the response rate calculation, as would a click on a product link. While most agreed that this negative action should not be counted as a positive, Stephanie Miller, vice president of strategic services for Return Path, made this excellent point: “I don’t think unsubscribes are negative. They are simply feedback — and as such, are positive in that they are actionable for marketers who care about creating solid subscriber experiences. There are lots of reasons why someone wants off the list, and usually it’s an indication of relevancy.”

This raises two important aspects of leveraging unsubcribes: learning from the data, and working to mitigate them.

The Email Diva’s first-ever article for MediaPost was on a new way to calculate the unsubscribe rate: unsubs/responders, which measures those who clicked on your email for the sole purpose of getting off your list. Try it and you’ll see greater variances from cell to cell and campaign to campaign. When you look at the data over time, and sort from high to low, you’ll see which content had the most or least resonance with your customers. As Stephanie points out, it will help you understand relevance in the eyes of your readers.

Your opt-out process provides an excellent opportunity to gather feedback and preferences. Address these four aspects:

1. Content Preferences — Give subscribers the options to indicate their preferences to improve relevance. These can either be positive “I am interested in silent sports” or negative “I am not interested in articles on camping.”

2. Frequency Preferences — Allow subscribers to reduce the volume of communication: “Send me email only once per week/month/quarter/year” (depending on your sending frequency). According to Stephanie, “offering even simple frequency options at the point of unsubscribe helps preserve up to 50% of those ‘exiting’ subscribers.”

3. Feedback – Ask unsubscribers to tell you why they’re leaving. This will give you useful information to improve your program overall. Ask open-ended questions as well as closed. While closed questions are easier to quantify, they only yield the results you anticipate.

4. User Experience — You’re saying good-bye to a customer, but you can still make the parting positive and keep the door open. The opt-out option should be prominent and easy to exercise, particularly if you are offering other options, e.g., “Click to opt-out” and “Click to update your preferences and tailor messages to your needs.” Say thank you for the time and space you were granted in your customer’s inbox. Use language that is consistent with your brand/email voice. A good example from Daily Candy asks, “Are we breaking up? Want to leave us for good? If you don’t mind us asking, why don’t you love us anymore?”

To leverage your unsubscribes, learn from your customers and learn from your data. Good Luck!

Don’t slam the door on parting subscribers

imediaconnection.com – Yes, you have to honor unsubscribe requests, but you don’t have to cut off communication. Here are five ways to salvage a relationship.

The research is in, and it shows clearly that email marketers don’t take rejection well. Unsubscribing is a landscape full of wasted opportunities, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You and your subscribers don’t have to part forever, and I’ll show you how.

First, here’s what two separate surveys on marketers and unsubscribes found:

• Marketers told EmailLabs they aren’t doing all they could to encourage unsubscribers to stick around. Less than 20 percent send a goodbye message, and fewer than one in 10 tell subscribers other ways they could stay in touch.
• Chad White’s Retail Email blog analyzed unsubscribe practices at 94 online retailers and found four in 10 don’t do any kind of outreach to engage unsubscribers.

Both surveys found most marketers honor unsubscribes almost immediately, and that’s good. But that better not be the best thing anyone can say about how you end email relationships. If it is, you’re letting the door slam on a relationship that might not really have to end.

Maybe that’s because a lot of you still think the unsubscribe is strictly a technical maneuver. Or are you so afraid of being sent to spammer jail that you’d just as soon cut off your unsubscribers than reach out to them with a follow-up email?

You can keep the conversation going, without violating any government regulations on commercial email, and maybe even salvage a stronger relationship on new grounds. Here are five ways:

1. Let subscribers choose how often they want to get email from you.
Sure, you’ve heard this advice before, but if Chad’s statistic is correct, only 16 percent of you have taken it to heart and actually give subscribers a chance to receive fewer emails. So you send offers two to three times a week? Offer a weekly alternative if the links stay active that long. Think of it as a cheap way to repurpose your daily content and keep the clicks coming in.

2. Let subscribers pick the content they really want, not just what you think they like.
Another not-earth-shattering suggestion, but again, one that only a few email marketers have taken to heart according to the research. You don’t even have to have a fancy content-management system that generates dynamic content down to the most granular level. Just create a new list that spins off one segment of your market and could appeal to a lucrative niche in your subscriber base.

3. List all the ways subscribers can receive information from you.
Sure, I love email, but I know it’s not the only way people want to receive information. Today, your subscribers have so many communication channels open to them that if one doesn’t work anymore, another one surely will. RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, IM deals, even old-fashioned paper catalogs are all ways you can keep the relationship alive if email no longer works.

4. Tell them in each email message how they can change or update their subscription records.
Think of this as a pre-emptive strike. Assuming they still open their email messages from you, you can put this important information where they’ll see it quickly, no matter whether they see a truncated version of your email in their preview pane or on their cellphone, or the whole message in all its HTML glory on a 21-inch desktop monitor.

Not everybody who unsubscribes really wants to leave. They might just want to change an email address because they’re switching email providers or dumping their current address because of spam from other senders. (Certainly not from you!)

5. Wrap it all up with an easily accessible subscriber page that loads with their data and lets them update with just a few clicks.
This means “no passwords.” If their records include sensitive data such as credit-card numbers or bank accounts, save that information on a separate page and restrict access to it there.

Look for other barriers, too. Do you still force confirmation on opt-outs as well (I hope!) as on opt-ins? Drop that barrier too. Instead, put a resubscribe line in a follow-up email or a confirmation page on your site. If they really did screw up and unsubscribe when they just wanted to change, they can resubscribe there.

If you spend even half the time on the back end of your email relationship with your customers as you do on the front end with acquisition, you’ll find you keep more of them around, and they’ll be a happier group.

ENurturing For An Efficient Sales Pipeline

mediapost.com – YEARS AGO, I FOLLOWED UP on a failed lead generation program by speaking to the salespeople who called the leads. They told me, “I called and asked if they wanted the product, but they weren’t interested.”

When I approached their manager to diplomatically question their sales skills, I was told, “Well, we had other priorities, so we couldn’t pay much attention to your program.”

If you’ve ever heard statements like these before, you know that creating a lead generation program the sales team will support is a challenge. This is where email can be a real hero. An eNurturing program, where leads are warmed up with a series of email communications, can help prequalify and target the best leads for sales — creating an efficient sales pipeline. A good eNurturing program can even help identify topics for sales to open a conversation with.

Successful eNurturing programs have three key components: sales buy-in, clearly defined goals, and specific success metrics.

1. Sales buy-in. Including your sales team in the planning can help you identify the right targets and topics to address. If sales feels included, they’re much more likely to make your program a priority.
2. Clearly defined goals. Ask the sales team to help define what a good lead would look like. This can help you define questions you need to ask, along with needs you should attempt to uncover through your eNurturing messages.
3. Specific success metrics. How many leads need to turn into sales for this program to be considered a success? What is the target gross sales goal? Communicating those metrics upfront can give the sales team a goal to shoot for, and help them sing your program’s praise when they meet that goal.

I originally thought my first lead generation program failed due to lack of sales support. It wasn’t quite that simple. Months later, I found out that the sales team had abandoned the program after the first calls proved they had embarrassingly bad leads.

An eNurturing program, using a series of emails to warm the leads and solicit additional information, could have sorted through respondents and flagged good leads. This would have resulted in a more efficient sales pipeline.

So how do you create an eNurturing program? Start by deciding whether you need multi-part eNurturing or long-term eNurturing.

Multi-part eNurturing

• Leads are sent a series of two to six emails over a set period of time.
• The number of emails depend on how many distinct message points you need to communicate.
• Calls-to-action are used to identify interests; click-throughs on specific topics or points are communicated to the sales team to aide follow up calls.

Long-term eNurturing

• Leads are sent a periodic newsletter, generally monthly.
• Emails continue indefinitely, as long as the lead doesn’t opt-out.
• Click-throughs on specific topics may be used to identify areas of interest and aid the sales team with follow up calls.

The type of program you run depends on your goals. If your product has a long sales cycle, combine a multipart program with a long-term program. That way, you can quickly validate leads for hand-off to your sales team, and then keep those leads engaged over time with your newsletter.

If your product has a short sales cycle, focus on a multipart eNurturing program with polls or other actions that generate the information you need to validate your leads. Share that information with your sales team, and you’ll be better positioned for success.

Retailers Ready For Narrower Opt-out Windows

mediapost.com – THERE’S NO SERIOUS TALK OF revising the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, but one of the constant fears is that Congress will narrow the window during which companies must honor opt-outs. The buzz has been that lawmakers will reduce the current window of 10 business days (14 days) down to three days. While I’ve heard several marketers fret about that possibility, the Email Experience Council’s latest research indicates that most marketers will be able to comply with that narrower window should it be enacted.

We’ll soon be releasing the Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study, which looks at the opt-out practices of 94 of the top online retailers, including how long it takes them to honor opt-outs. We found that 86% honored opt-out requests within three days, with many of those retailers honoring the requests immediately, as evidenced by the high proportion of retailers that sent no more emails after receiving the request. Another 4% honored opt-outs within seven days, and another 3% within the CAN-SPAM-mandated 14 days. The remaining 4% either didn’t honor opt-outs in time or didn’t honor them at all because of technical failures.

The EEC is also currently running a one-question survey on its homepage that asks marketers how long they need in order to honor opt-outs. Currently 82% of respondents have indicated that they can honor opt-outs within three days, roughly in line with our study results.

The results of both the study and the ongoing survey are proof of how the email marketing industry has matured in the wake of the CAN-SPAM Act in terms of technical ability. It’s surely also a sign of the need to respect consumers’ inboxes or face spam complaints and deliverability problems. For those retailers and other businesses that take longer than three days to honor unsubscribes, this should be a wakeup call to tighten up your processes to keep up with the rising standards in the industry.

Of course, while retailers excelled at quick unsubscribes, there were a few areas where their opt-out processes were lacking, like providing consumers with alternatives to actually unsubscribing. For more on that and much more, check out the study when it’s released in a week or two. Or better yet, register for the EEC’s Email Evolution Conference in San Diego next month, as every attendee will get a copy of the report for free. Hope to see you there.

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