What’s the main reason for people unsubscribing from your email list? Hint: it’s not offensive emails, and it’s not too much clutter in their email inbox.

The real culprit, according to research by MarketingSherpa, is… irrelevance.

MarketingSherpa’s recent survey of consumers across the United States found that over half – 58 percent – of people who unsubscribed from business email lists or no longer read emails from businesses was due to those emails not being relevant to them.

The second reason for people unsubscribing or no longer reading emails from a business was receiving too many emails from that business (44 percent) and the third reason was receiving too many emails from multiple sources (31 percent).

Other reasons for unsubscribing or no longer reading commercial emails were that: the emails no longer applied to the recipient (20 percent), the recipient’s situation changed (13 percent), and that the recipient chose to use social networks or other media as an alternative to email (8 percent).

So how do you stay relevant to your list? The simple answer is to continue sending your subscribers messages that address their motivation for subscribing to your list in the first place.

Now, there will always be some subscribers who may not realise what they’ve really signed up for when they give you their name and email.

Based on the feedback we’ve received here at Kikabink News, a lot of subscribers have been surprised by the format and content of this newsletter. Same with some of our other email lists, although not to the same extent. I imagine this is the case – for better and worse – for other email lists too.

So there will always be some ‘churn’ due to people signing up and then realising that your emails don’t really address their wants or needs. (There will also be people who STAY on your list because they’ve been pleasantly surprised!)

But apart from that, I think the best way to stay relevant is to, as much as possible, set the expectations your subscribers are likely to have… and then meet those expectations.

A good way of checking to see that you’re meeting those expectations is to keep track of open rates and click-through rates.

These rates are not, of themselves, perfect indicators of your level of readership. For example, the general decline in open rates has as much to do with email filters disabling images as much as anything else. But the trends in those metrics ARE indicative.

After a while, you should start seeing patterns – the headlines, topics and articles that garner the most interest, based on opens and click-throughs.

At the end of the day, relevance is the ‘holy grail’ of email marketing (and probably marketing as a whole). And the good news is that, although you can’t do much about cluttered email inboxes, you can do a lot to stay relevant to your audience.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “The Real Culprit Behind Unsubscribes,” MarketingSherpa, March 17, 2009

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Email Marketing, Feature, List Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.