Why email subscribers unsubscribe?

All marketers are working hard to answer this question : How to gain subscribers loyaulty? This article will not unveil magic words but we can determine 5 main reasons why the users want to unsbscribe.

Emarketer published some weeks ago an analysis on email unsubscription. These Data reveal the main reasons why people unsubscribe. Here below is the graph:

Based on this analysis, let’s talk about these 5 main reasons which lead people to unsuscribe and let’s try to think of a way to avoid these situation.

1. Irrevelancy of the content

Judging from Emarketer email unsubscription analysis, we can see that wherever email subscribers are coming from ( Asia Pacific / Western Europe / North America), more than 1 in 2 unsbscribe because of the irrevelancy of the content.

To avoid this fenomenom, you should care about your subcribers and perfectly know their expectations. If they subscribed to your newsletter, this is because they found a personal or professional interest, so make sure you can plainly satisfy their needs. Make a clever and specific segmentation of your readers so that you can provide them with a customised content.

2. Frequency of the dispatch

We can see that to send too much emails to your subcribers can rapidly irritate them. That’s the second reason referred by Emarketer analysis . As for the first reason, I think this is really important to listen to your readers before asphixiate them three-weekly.

What you could do to anticipate this issue, is to ask to new subscribers how many times they want to receive the newsletter ( daily, weekly, monthly) and to facilitate the change of the frequency within a click. If readers are aware that they will receive the newsletter every week, they won’t be surprised and therefore will not be frustrated.

3. Subscribers privacy

For this third reason, we can observe that one in two North American unsbscribe because they don’t feel that privacy policy is respected anymore and even think that their email adresses are shared or sold to partners.

This type of situation is quite easy to avoid. If you know that you will share your email adresses with others companies, you need to ask to new subscribers if they agree to receive emails from partners by offering them to tick a box to agree or not. If you ask people and give them choice, they will feel like they control the information flow, so you will also consistently reduce the risk to see your unsuscribe rate increasing.

4. Don’t recall signing up

As internet users are subscribing to many newsletters and as they also received many email contents , the risk of forgetting from where, when and why they subscribed one newsletter is quite high.

You can’t warn people from subscribing to too many content. But even if they don’t recall signing up, the decisive criteria which will lead users to unsusbscribe is that the content they read at a glance does not fit their needs or their expectations. It could be interesting to know what seduced users the first time they subscribed to your newsletter and why they eventually unsubscribe.

Make a tiny little survey with a check box to know why the subscribers want to unsubscribe. It can help you to improve your quality content.

5. Privacy concerns

Actually, last but not least, unsubscription can be due to a change of marital situation, or a born of a child which can lead to a lack of time to read email contents. You can’t really anticipate this type of unsubscription but I would tend to say these are the most natural unsubscriptions.This is part of your email adresses life cycle.

Here we are, we’ve got our 5 most important reasons that people want to unsubscribe.The key to prevent this fenomenom is to care about your customers, to listen to them and to ensure that they are fully satisfied with the content they receive.

If we look at  Emarketer graph, we can see that whatever the geographical region, the percentages of unsubscription are really closed. So if you experimented some situation you would like to share or if you fancy reacting about this article, feel free to leave a comment.

This article was originally created by Marie Girardet