The “Emotionally Unsubscribed”
Jun 01 2009
You have them, we have them, they have them. You might even be one of them. Who are these people I am referring to? Well quite simply I heard them referred to last week as the “emotionally unsubscribed”. I loved this term and I am not sure if I had heard it before last week.
The funny thing is that without any more explanation of these people, I knew who they were. I even knew that I might be one of them for some of the emails that I am subscribed to. I will bet that you could be one of these as well. What do you think? Are you?
The notion of labeling people on your lists are are active subscribers to your lists, but do not read or click your emails for months on end. It is not that they are not interested in you or your emails, but just not lately. These people are not going to break up with you anytime soon. But they are going to have an impact on your results. So what can you do to re-engage them? There are a few things that I thought of (as actually we are going through a 9 month review our our own newsletter at eROI in order to segment and make some changes to the layouts and content) that you might be able to do. What are they?
1. Review your stats? I know that our own newsletter stats are good, even better than most industry standards, but there are a group of subscribers that are just on the list and typically do nothing with the emails. When we go through our stats we are looking for trends that we can segment subscribers by to get their blood pumping again. We look for how we can either use different subject lines that might be like placing the paddles of their hearts. Maybe a little shock, a question or even the tease of breaking up. But should we move them all to a separate list? Not at first. Dynamic data is the first step in bring the love back.
2. Testing the water of love. Yep there I said it. We are going to reach out to them in new ways that might not actually be our newsletter. That’s right something completely different. We actually have a few of these we test during our typical 90 day welcome series that work well and could be adapted to a more direct engagement.
3. The tease. They say that distance makes the heart grow fonder. So what if we look at changing the frequency of these people to quarterly instead of monthly? Without them asking? Sure. If they are not engaging at the current frequency maybe we should keep our distance and see if they miss us.
There are a few others ways, but I cannot give you all our mojo here. What matters whether it be our program or yours is to look at how to grab their attention again. These people are not done with you, but they need a little TLC to get back to the love zone with you.
Just put this on your wall to think about “unemotionally subscribed” how do we move them to “emotionally subscribed”.
- Posted by Dylan Boyd
- @dtboyd
- at 8:44 AM
Published in Behavioral Marketing, eMail Marketing Optimization
(4 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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June 9th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Hi Dylan
I first came across the term emotionally unsubscribed to describe the long term inactives on your list 2 – 3 years ago and I have never liked it particularly when it comes to people who have given you permission to email them.
I dislike the term because:
1. I really find it hard to believe anyone is so disengaged with your program that they can’t be bothered to unsubscribe – it only takes a click!
2. It is a very negative way of looking at the issue of inactives and implies that it is a result of some kind of failing on the part of the person sending the email; a classic case of what I call fear and self loathing in email marketing.
With very few exceptions when it comes to sales and marketing, long term inactivity is perfectly normal. After all, how often do you actively interact with marketing communications of any kind from a car dealer, insurance company, real estate agent, bank, consumer electronics retailer, hotel chain etc? So why should email marketing be any different?
I prefer to call them Unemotionally Subscribed
Given that between 35% and 55% of your list will NOT have interacted with your emails for between 6 months and a year, I think that a better description is that they unemotionally subscribed – that is they do want to receive your emails, but don’t need your content or offer yet. They would prefer to ignore your messages until they are ready to buy, because it is easier than unsubscribing and having to remember your url or Google you at a later date.
We have gathered plenty of evidence of this phenomenon, from our deep dives into client data and here are some examples:
- $110,000 generated by subscribers who had not opened (downloaded images) or click on the previous 25 to 40 emails – it was a great offer.
- 10% of 2008 revenue generated by subscribers who did not open or click at all in 2007
- The most common or modal open, click or purchase frequency across every email audit we have ever conducted is 1.
The takeaway is simple. While some of those inactive addresses may be people who fit the emotionally unsubscribed description, the vast majority are unemotionally subscribed – they don’t need you.- yet!
So don’t beat yourself up over the fact that they don’t feel compelled to read every email you send.