Gmail recently introduced an “Unsubscribe” button to the top of their emails, making opting out of email lists a one-click process. Adweek suggested that the unsubscribe button would spell the death knell for email marketing. They couldn’t be more wrong.
Why your list is really unsubscribing.
If people are unsubscribing it’s because they don’t want to receive your emails. If they used the ‘unsubscribe’ button, then the only apparent reason they didn’t unsubscribe before was because they couldn’t be bothered to scroll down your emails to find the unsubscribe link at the bottom. The unsubscribe button is not the real threat here—the email that people couldn’t be bothered to scroll down, even to find the unsubscribe link, let alone read, is email marketing’s enemy.
Don’t worry about the unsubscribers.
If people are not interested in our emails, you don’t want them in your list anyways. These subscribers skew the engagement rate and cause email deliverability issues by reporting your email as spam when they are not interested enough to scroll down to the bottom of the email to find the unsubscribe link. Those are not the customers you should be worrying about.
Who to send emails to.
Email marketers should be worrying about customers who may have expressed interest once but are becoming disengaged because of irrelevant, impersonalized, untimely and/or uninspired messages. Our CMO described a few types of at-risk-customers in an earlier blog article Six Predictive Email Marketing Tips.
If you can deliver timely, personalized and relevant email campaigns to these 6 types of customers there is no reason for them to want to unsubscribe or for you to worry about the new unsubscribe button.