Are You Depleting Your Email List?

In all the effort to drives conversions marketers often forget to measure “Unsubscribe” metrics and their impact on the email marketing.  As I mentioned in my post “Number One Email Marketing Mistake”, email marketers, in order to maximize short term conversions,  often bombard irrelevant emails in subscribers inbox However this short term mentality results in erosion of long term viability of their email marketing, due to increase in unsubscribes causing depletion of email lists.

Getting an unsubscribe is easy, however getting more people to subscribe is very difficult and expensive. Email marketers need to have a long term view and protect the subscribers they have. They need to treat reducing the unsubscribes as critical, if not more, as driving people to subscribe.

I have come across some cases where the list situation is so bad that the unsubscribes will completely wipe out the marketers ability to do emailing marketing in next few year.   In order to ensure that you have a viable list, you need to closely watch and analyze the unsubscribe and subscribe metrics, few metrics that you should look at are:

1. Total Unsubscribes/Total Email List in your database– This will help you understand what % of emails you can actually email to.
2. Percent Unsubscribes/Email Sent – This will help you figure out if you need to adjust your email frequency.
3. New Unsubscribes/New Subscribes – This ratio if greater than 1 than you are heading for trouble. Lower than 1 indicates that the direction is good though you need other numbers to understand the full impact.

In addition you should look at you ability to grow the list and see how soon you will hit the growth plateau. Once you hit the growth plateau, reducing the unsubscribes becomes even more critical.
Related Post: 7 Ways to Create Relevancy in Emails