Unsubscribing people who don’t click
- This topic has 2 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 5 months, 1 week ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
I’m more interested in having an engaged list than a big list that doesn’t ever take any action. But I’m wondering if I should unsubscribe people who don’t click, even if they open emails. If so, how many emails sent without any clicks before unsubscribing?
-
List hygiene is not a bad thing, but I probably wouldn’t jump directly to clickers only. Try segmenting people who don’t engage at all (open or click) – how many people is that?
You could also try to re-engage with them. Not all email clients report people that open emails; they may be blocking tracking pixels. Clicks will usually be reasonably accurate though.
Depending on your autoresponder software, you could either manually try to re-engage with a follow-up sequence offering them an incentive to click on the link, and warning them that they’ll be unsubscribed if they don’t respond. You could do a single email or 3-5 emails over the course of a week at different times of day. Just be sure to segment out anybody that does click on the link so you don’t keep trying to re-engage them (or worse, unsubscribe somebody at the end that specifically asked you not to.)
You may also want to include an email that lets them reply to you since sometimes technology isn’t perfect, and then you can tag them to not put them through re-engagement sequences in the future.
If possible, you could setup a scheduled task that runs on a regular basis (whether that’s monthly, or quarterly, or just runs every day as individual people meet a threshold where they haven’t opened or clicked on an email in a certain period of time, such as 90 days.) Just make sure to exclude anybody that you manually tag as not registering their opens in that case.
At the end of the sequence you can go ahead and unsubscribe or delete the people that are still inactive. It’ll hurt the first time as it’s often a lot of people, but your mailing bill goes down and your engagement numbers go up, both of which are good things.
-
Great input, thanks, Blaine! I think the sequence trying to get people to click is a good idea. I give opportunities for people to click in every single email, which is why it seems strange that some people have opened dozens of emails and not clicked on anything.
I also sometimes ask people to hit reply, and some people do, but not a huge percentage. I like the idea of tagging people who reply. I also tag people who respond to surveys, since that takes some effort, and I always feel those people are more engaged.
Interestingly enough, my open rate is actually pretty good for the most part (around 35-40%), and as you said, opens aren’t always tracked, so it’s probably even better than it seems. I think I need to come up with some juicy freebies to see if I can get those who haven’t clicked on anything to take some action. Thanks for giving me some good food for thought.
-
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.