7 Reasons you are losing email subscribers

You’re losing email subscribers! It doesn’t make any sense – you’re such a nice company.

You’re non-salesy, have a fascinating product, loads of happy customers and a brand image that has been constantly developed to keep pace with your industry and its audience.

So, why do people keep leaving your email list? Why are they clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ button when you’re so awesome?

Unfortunately, some of them clearly don’t seem to be as enamoured with your brand as you are. Nor do they think you’re quite as awesome as you think you are.

But that’s fine. You can’t please everyone.

Despite that unavoidable fact, you might be turning a few people off inadvertently; people who could quite easily become loyal customers.

Here’s the top reasons you’re probably losing subscribers.

You bought a list

Naughty. We don’t like it when people buy email marketing lists. In fact, hardly anyone does.

It doesn’t benefit the people on the list. It doesn’t work for the ISP and email marketing platform you use, and it certainly won’t do much for your brand image when the spam complaints come flooding in.

Don’t do it. Ever. Purchased lists of emails might look tempting and good value for money, but the people contained within them either don’t exist or, if they do, have absolutely no interest in receiving emails from you. Hence all the un-subscriptions.

Your follow-up email didn’t live up to the promise

If you’re sending out a series of timed emails, it’s important they live up to any promises you make.

For instance, if your first email offers a tantalising glimpse at a forthcoming offer but that offer never materialises (often, due to bad planning or unforeseen delays at your end), the next email that attempts to brush over the fact might result in a few unsubscribes.

Make good on your email marketing promises – always.  Before you drive away your email subscribers.

You’ve fallen into the clickbait trap

This is a surprisingly easy bad habit to get into, because we’re all flooded with clickbait in our inboxes and during web browsing sessions every day.

Clickbait, if you’re scratching your head, is usually a headline or image that promises something incredible for anyone who clicks through. And that ‘something’ is nearly always fabricated, overly embellished or completely at odds with the headline.

“You won’t believe what happened to Bruce Willis when he ordered coffee yesterday morning”… that kind of thing.

When it comes to email marketing, clickbait can most often be found in subject lines. If you’re using words or phrases such as ‘what you need to know about…’, ‘the secret of…’, ‘the shocking truth’ or ‘you won’t believe…’, lots of people will immediately assume you’re nothing more than spam and treat the email accordingly.

Your emails aren’t much to look at

Beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder, but if your emails aren’t designed to be attractive to more people than those in your marketing department, subscribers may decide to leave you for good.

Marketing is a superficial beast at times, but that’s important to remember while you’re creating your email campaigns. They need to be visually appealing as soon as they’re opened.

Make sure they look good on mobile devices, too, because it’s a safe bet that most of your subscribers will be viewing them on their smartphones.

You haven’t personalised the campaign

It’s time to mention that word again – personalisation.

A brilliant way to turn off email subscribers is to treat them all as nothing more than numbers on a list.

If you have data on your subscribers (their full name, purchasing history, demographical stuff – that kind of thing), you can segment your list and use your email marketing client’s personalisation tools to send them emails that appear to be designed for the individual.

You address them incorrectly

Ever received an email that has addressed you by the wrong name or title? Annoying, isn’t it? And you may have felt tempted to unsubscribe, given what little thought had clearly been put into that email.

As noted above, personalising emails is a brilliant way to increase engagement with your audience, but as great as modern email marketing clients are, they’re only as good as the data processor that enters them.

This is why it’s always important to double check as many emails as you can before they go out. Unless you have a particularly small list, you probably can’t check each and every one, but a scoot through the preview pane before you hit ‘send’ will help you spot any obvious errors and spelling mistakes.

You’re sending emails too frequently

Are you a clinger? Do you constantly email your marketing list in the hope they’ll one day take the bait?

They probably won’t. And, what’s worse, if you really are a bit too trigger-happy with the ‘send’ button, you’ll simply end up irritating them to the point where they feel they have no choice but to unsubscribe.

Losing email subscribers: wrap up

It’s important to bear in mind that no matter how closely you stick to your guns by avoiding the above unsubscribe banana skins, you’ll never eradicate them completely.

That’s actually a very good thing indeed, because if you do everything you can to engage the people you email and talk to them as individuals, the only recipients who click ‘unsubscribe’ will be the people who offer your list no value.

There’s such a thing as a non-value email subscriber – just make sure you’re keeping the ones who really should be on the list.