Exploiting the Opt-Out Process

When a recipient opts out of your mailing list or newsletter, it doesn’t mean that they hold anything against you or are upset with your organisation. They may have just signed up to your newsletter to get some information before purchasing, or may not find the email content what they need. Many marketers think that the opt-out means goodbye, but you can use it to do so much more...

The two of the most common reasons that recipients opt out of newsletters are:

• Timing of Content is not right
• Content is irrelvant to the recipient

Frequency

Your recipient may love your newsletters and content, but sending them weekly may be just too much to handle. Generally, the recipient would either ignore your emails and only open them when they are ready,  or opt out completely.

Giving your recipients the opportunity to choose the frequency of emails that they receive will help you to send only when the recipient wants information and make the recipient feel that they have more of a dialogue with your organisation.

If this is done effectively, you will notice that your open rates will increase, in turn reducing your non-responder rates. You will need to ensure that you maintain this frequency or you may damage your reputation with your recipients. If you offer a monthly newsletter, make sure you send it at the same time each month!

If you want more information on how to implement this, please click to contact Campaign Master Professional Services.

Content

The content of your email is also very important for ensuring that recipients don’t opt out. If your content is perceived as irrelevant to them, they will either opt-out, ignore you or report your email as SPAM.

To counter this, you can ask your recipients what sort of content that they want to receive from you through a form and then use the Dynamic Content module to deliver that content in the email. This allows your communications to be more effective and show your recipients that you are interested in what they want to hear about. For example, if you are sending out a sporting themed email, you might ask what sports your recipient wants to hear about. Giving them the options of say Cricket, Rugby Union and Australian Football would allow them to choose only the sports that they are interested in and send them only content that they find relevant.

If you are interested in finding out more about this feature, please contact us.

Sign up to other newsletters from you organisation

If you are like most organisations, you will have multiple newsletters that are sent out for different recipient types and requirements.

It is therefore possible that your recipients are subscribed to more than one newsletter and if they opt out of one, they will more then likely be opted out of all your other newsletters as well.

In this case, you should consider setting up a customised opt out page that allows your recipient to choose which newsletters they want to receive and which ones they don’t.

Combining this with the techniques above will slow down your list attrition rates and help you to send the possible communications to your recipients.

Change of Email Address

A common opt out reason is due to a change of email address, where a recipient may be moving to a new organisation or changing ISP. Creating a form asking the recipient to update their details will allow them to change thier email address and update the Campaign Master system. The recipient doesn’t need to subscribe again and you keep all of the data that you have collected for them.

Understand why the opt out has occurred

Even with the best content, frequency and opt out pages, you will still get people that want to opt out of newsletters. It is important to respect the opt out request and make this process as easy as possible for the recipient so that they are not forced to use the report as SPAM option.

You should also consider adding a very quick survey, no more than one or two questions, to the opt-out page. This will help you gauge why recipients are opting out and allow you to change your sending behaviour if you notice trends in the opt-out reasoning.