Do you ask people to unsubscribe from your email list often enought?

Asking your email list subscribers to unsubscribe from your email lists may at first seem counter-intuitive. After all, it feels good to see that you have a big email list – right? But long term it makes perfect sense to ask people to unsubscribe.

Back when I started email marketing in the 1990’s having a large email list and blasting out emails made perfect sense. But times have changed.

1. There are more companies sending consumers emails – every company these days has a list and email marketing is seen as easy and “free”.
2. As consumers are receiving more and more e-mails, so there is more noise in everyone’s inbox and so consumers have become less engaged and responsive to emails – especially to the blatant “buy my stuff” emails.
3. ISP’s such as Hotmail, Gmail, Office 365 etc etc have got much smarter. They know who is and who isn’t opening and responding to our emails.

So we know that the ISP’s can measure how engaged our email list is with our emails. So if you have a huge email list where say only 25% of that list are engaging ie opening the emails, clicking links and replying and you are regularly blasting out emails then the ISP’s will know this. And having a list with say 75% non-engagement will lower your quality score as a sender with the ISP’s. As a result, more and more of your engaged email contacts will end up in the spam folders. So I hope you can see how damaging it is to keep hold of old non-responsive email contacts for the sake of the vanity of having a large email list.

There are many list hygiene actions you can take. Check out my other post. But an easy one to implement in your email sending platform, be it Infusionsoft, Keap, MailChimp, Constant Contact etc is to regularly ask your subscribers to unsubscribe if they are no longer interested in receiving your emails.

Email Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash