Yes, I did say Unsubscribe rate. People often ask us how do you get people to subscribe, and we go to great pains to come up with new and novel ways of building their permission based e-marketing database. One of the things we try and get across is that it doesn’t matter how much effort you put into building a list (and you really have to build the list, not buy it or rent it) if you don’t treat your list with care, you’re going to lose it fast.
An example – I’m on the mailing list of one of the large event managers in Ireland and they regularly send rather bland and irrelevant ads for events that they are promoting. But I put up with them normally because it’s kinda good to know what else is going on. But just now, when I checked my e-mail I received six copies of the same ad which were large enough to take minutes to download. Six copies. Sorry, that’s me outta there… I hit the unsubscribe button.
We’ve seen this so often – with NEO Ireland, the Network for Event Organisers that we run, we try and send fewer than 2 emails a month to our database. Every time we increase the frequency we lose people. On the one hand, it’s good to clean out the list on a regular basis, but on the other hand – each one of them is potentially a precious jewel. Treat ‘em keen – you don’t want them turning mean!
