Your unsubscribe form’s text box allows your (former) subscribers to explain why they are opting out from your email SEO newsletter. Rather than just ignoring them as sour grapes from hapless losers, these comments can shed considerable light on how your entire email campaign is being perceived by your audience.
“Email newsletters are sent too frequently”
If there is an aspect where most SEO email marketers phail epically it has to be in sending too many emails with not enough time between them. You’re marketing SEO services, not trying to keep up with the latest Lady Gaga costume change. When you are seeing unsubscribes related to frequency you can bet that there are many more who didn’t bother to visit your unsubscription form at all but simply marked your emails as spam. A bit too much of that and your online emailing reputation will go down the tubes and your deliverability rates will plummet.
“Content duplicated from your website”
You have to take for granted that your faithful subscriber is already familiar with your website, so simply repurposing your public content by copying and pasting into your email newsletters devalues the reasons for subscribing in the first place. If you’re just shoveling out the same old boilerplate you have no one to blame for your unsubscribes but yourself.
“No longer interested”
They were interested enough to opt-in but you’ve lost them since. Usually this unsubscription complaint means that you have failed to keep the content relevant enough for your reader. Segmenting your email campaign list by demographic, geographic, and behavior categories will help you provide email newsletters that speak directly to that customer. Avoiding generic content will help your subscriber stay interested and engaged.
“Linkage problems”
Dead links are the bane of all email marketers. Testing every single link before you send out your newsletters can help keep this particular complaint down, but there will be times when your servers may be strained because a large number of recipients are clicking on your site at the same time (such as when you’re Slashdotted) and your IT architecture can’t handle the sudden influx. Keeping your landing page file sizes to a minimum will also help to get them to display quickly on slower and mobile connections.
“Display is awkward or wrong”
There are more than 2,500 major mobile web enabled devices and many of them have unique display resolutions and standards, so it has now become imperative to test out your email template on competent and broad-based emulators. Taking this important step will ensure that your messages are not showing up as a dog’s breakfast on the various smartphones and tablets.
“No longer using that email address”
If you read carefully, this unsubscriber is not telling you that they don’t want to receive your newsletters to their email address any longer, they are telling you that you have failed to provide them with a readily accessible way that they can change their preferences, including informing you of a new email address. Retool your preference center so that it doesn’t require a maze map to decipher and ensure that the links to it are prominently featured in each email newsletter you send out.
“Too much selling”
The essence of every successful SEO email marketing newsletter campaign is to emphasize the “newsletter” and camouflage the “marketing.” Your subscribers did not give you permission to send your emails so that they could be bludgeoned and cajoled into signing up for your services, but to be informed and entertained about your view on current developments and the state of the SEO industry as a whole.
You can comfortably ignore the outliers: “Thank you but I am no longer in the market for SEO services” needs no more scrutiny than “#$&% YOU & YOUR #$&%ING SEO #$&%!” However, the comments which fall in between these two extremes can reveal more about your email campaign performance than a battery of A/B split or multivariate tests. Start reading and fully absorbing your opt-out form comments and you will discover a wealth of information that you can use to build your own wealth!
