When customers and prospects agree to receive emails from your company, it means you’ve established a certain level of trust and respect. It’s not easy to create so much interest in a product or service that people willingly provide their real contact information and risk being spammed with emails to delete every day. But trust is a two-way street. There’s an expectation that the company sending the emails will exercise some restraint and respect for the recipients – a show of some gratitude in exchange for subscribing.
How can you tell if you’re demonstrating respect for the people on your list? Check the unsubscribes. If you’re losing more than two or three each time you send an email – even if your list is well into the thousands – then you may be abusing the terms of the relationship. Are you emailing too often? Or is the content different or less informative than what people expected when opting in? Even a single spam report is a sign to take an objective look at your email marketing campaign before sending again.
You can also check the open rates and click rates. If fewer subscribers are opening the emails than in the past, then, at some point, people concluded the content doesn’t offer enough value to bother. They may even be marking it as spam. If people open but don’t click anything, then consider increasing the value of the content. Your subscribers already demonstrated they want to learn more about your company, product, and/or service – there must be a video, live stream event, white paper, or fresh news you could offer to entice a click and bring them back to your Website.
Nobody stumbles upon a Website and subscribes to the email newsletter or checks an opt-in subscribe box on a contact form out of the blue for no reason. In fact, you probably invested quite a bit of time, effort, expertise, and marketing money to bring these prospects to your Website in the first place.
In B2B sales and marketing when years may go by between the initial contact and a sale, it’s vital to stay in touch over time and email allows it to be done without being intrusive. High or increasing unsubscribe rates suggest your email marketing program is intrusive.
Over-emailing and/or offering information with little value nullify the marketing investment in list building and lead generation. Treat the people on your email list like people rather than contacts in a CRM and watch your open, click, and conversion rates soar.
