Celebrate your unsubscribes

Lost a subscriber from your list?

Celebrate!!

You want to grow your email list. So you’re always happy when new people subscribe to your list.

But here’s a good reason to be happy when people unsubscribe from your  list as well.

You see, the objective is to get a happy engaged list.  The total number of people on your list isn’t that important.  What’s important is that the people on your list are interested in what you have to say.

There is a major retailer who got me on their list.  I’m not sure how I got there.  I think at some point I put my email on some transaction with them and they decided that since I have done business with them, I’m fair game their email broadcasts.  And under the spam laws, they’re correct.  I’m a former customer so its technically not spam.

Then their marketing staff must have read an article somewhere that says, “the more you mail your list, the more money you will make.”

The trouble is, I find the company completely uninspiring and their email is a major annoyance.  It would be less of an annoyance, if they sent it weekly. But they send it daily.   They send it often enough, that I decided “hey, I’m tired of this junk.  I need to unsubscribe.”

So when I click the unsubscribe button, they put up a message that says it may take up to seven days to take me off their list.

Really?  Seven days?  How hard is it to remove my name from their list.  Now I know that not only are they an uninspiring company with annoying and irrelevant email, their IT staff is a bunch of idiots.  Well, that or they just want an excuse to try to send me a few more emails before I’m gone.

Why would you do that?  I’ve just been good enough to let them know I’m not their target customer.  Now they want to leave a bad taste and make me think of them as a spammer as well.  Maybe I, and a few thousand other similarly situated people will hit the spam button n response to some of their emails.  That could create deliverability issues for the people who are on their list and want to receive the emails.  If they use an independent service, they might get banned.

When somebody unsubscribes from your list, you should celebrate!!  They helped you focus your list to people who really care about what you have to say.  They saved their time and yours.

If somebody wants off your list, make it easy for them.  If you don’t want people to leave your list, send them stuff of value far enough apart that they have time to digest it and make use of it.  But when they want off, for God’s sake, LET THEM GO.

Both you and they will be better off for it.

And that is a reason to celebrate your unsubscribes.