People who unsubscribe are not always bad. It is better to have people who unsubscribe than to have people in your list who are irrelevant. Therefore, try not to focus too much on the unsubscribe rate.
The unsubscribe rate indicates the percentage of people who unsubscribe, often based on recipients of a sent email. So it indicates the people who unsubscribe from your entire email list and thus prefer not to receive any more emails from you.
The average unsubscribe rate per email is between 0.2 and 0.5%. So to have a good unsubscribe rate you shouldn’t be much above this. This will cause your deliverability to get worse and it also indicates that the emails you send are not relevant enough.
How do you improve your unsubscribe rate? Below I will give three different components you can optimize to get a lower unsubscribe rate.
Try to get your audience involved by having them respond to your emails and by asking them direct questions. Also, don’t send offer by offer, but make your emails fun to read. Send valuable emails and make recipients happy with your emails.
The holidays are coming or it’s almost Black Friday and you want to send a lot of emails because you made a nice offer. No problem, but try sending an email first announcing that you are going to send a lot of emails and if people don’t want to receive them they can temporarily unsubscribe.
This ensures that people who remain subscribed are informed for what is to come and the people who unsubscribe are not permanently unsubscribed. So a real win-win situation!
Stop sending emails to your entire email list, but create segments within your list. Then send email campaigns only to the segments for which this email is relevant.
Do you have a pet store and dog food is on sale? Then don’t send this email to the contacts in your list who don’t have a dog. This will ensure that your emails are a lot more relevant and thus you will get fewer unsubscribes.
In addition, it is important to say that unsubscribes are not necessarily bad. If you have a high unsubscribe rate of 5-10% then something is indeed wrong, but it is logical that there are always some unsubscribes when you send an email.
To avoid this, don’t make unsubscribing very difficult by hiding your unsubscribe link or making it very small. This will cause people to submit spam complaints and this is 10x worse than an unsubscription.
To improve your unsubscribe rate, try sending more relevant emails and make sure you always send to people who have subscribed to your newsletter.