E-mail List Churn: Four Ways to Retain Subscribers

Any e-mail list is going to suffer from a degree of churn. Subscribers may grow tired of receiving your campaigns, find that your newsletters are no longer pertinent, or simply lack the time to read and absorb your content.

Though some opt-outs cannot be avoided, if you take a proactive approach, you can reduce the number of subscribers exiting your e-mail list. Here are four tactics:

1) Offer reduced frequency. The best e-mail campaigns let subscribers decide how often they want to receive messages from your company. Some of your customers might enjoy your content but not the rate at which you’re sending it.

To keep subscribers who, say, want to receive special holiday promotions but don’t care for daily newsletters, give them a choice of frequency. Offer a weekly or monthly digest-version of your newsletter in addition to daily or weekly updates.

2) Give a choice of newsletters. This ties in with the above suggestion. If you’re segmenting your e-mail lists properly, you can let your subscribers decide which newsletters they want to receive. For instance, one subscriber might want to be on the list to receive a flowers-only newsletter but not necessarily on the general garden center list.

Where do you give your customers these options? Right when they’re on the verge of opting out. When they click on that