You’ve spent hours planning, crafting, designing your email marketing campaign before it’s ready to go out. Then you finally click the send button and off it goes to a vast horizon of followers. That’s when it happens: you get a notification that someone’s unsubscribed from your mailing list. It’s arguably one of the most defeating thing to see after you’ve put in all that work. However, it’s not totally over. There are steps you can take to see what when wrong, prevent this from happening to other people, and maybe even win back that unsubscriber.

Figuring Out Where You Went Wrong

 

Before you work on winning back anyone, step one is figuring out what went wrong so that you’re not losing even more people. The first mistake people make is waiting too long to send out campaigns. Start-ups and enterprise organizations are particularly guilty of this since email marketing is a distant rung on the ladder – a marketing goal to get to when it’s convenient. Except that if someone has signed up for an update, they’re going to want an update while you’re still relevant to them.

Another mistake that gets made is not segmenting the list – which should be done at the sign-up stage. A third is not a/b testing campaigns. It could be the content, the subject line, or even the design. You won’t know for sure until you say the same thing a couple different ways to see which if one – or either – were well-received.

Creating a Dialogue with Unsubscribers

 

Never underestimate the power of a dialogue. In a day and age where everything moves lightning fast and communication is so cold and detached, it’s a powerful move to reach out to a person and kindle a conversation. Most people have opinions and social media has primed them to want to share it. So, chances are they’re going to want to share that opinion.

Create a human connection and reach out to your unsubscriber. You have your unsubscriber’s email address. And at some point they did opt in to hearing from you, so reach out to them. Send a personal email letting them know you’ve noticed they’ve unsubscribed and that you’re sorry to see that. Ask them why they did and what type of content they were hoping to see. They clearly had an idea of what to expect and aren’t seeing that in what you’re producing.

This is an opportunity to learn, especially if multiple unsubscribers are sharing the same narrative.

Winning Back Your Unsubscribers

 

Now that you’ve assessed what went wrong, it’s time to move forward and win these people back. This is not for the faint of heart. It will take some work and a degree of customization, but I’m confident it’s worth it. There’s nothing more powerful than a brand that can be human. You’ve done the hard part already by creating a dialogue with this individual. Now that you have the intel, act on it.

If there’s an email campaign you can gear off of their feedback, create it and then personally send it to them. Do this a few times. Get their feedback and make it unique to their interests. Invite them back onto a segmented list (and actually use the segmented list) so that they’re only getting the content they’re interested in.