According to MarketingSherpa research at their latest Email Summit, “Inbox Clutter” isn’t the real reason people unsubscribe from your mailings. The top two real reasons people unsubscribe from your ezine or mailing list is:
- Emails weren’t relevant to me.
- Received too many emails from the sender.
MarketingSherpa goes on to say, “The top two answers both speak to the importance of the individual relationship between emailer and recipient. They identify relevance and campaign-level frequency as the top reasons for opting-out or simply ignoring a sender’s email.”
Here’s a chart from MarketingSherpa outlining their results:
How can you know whether your emails are relevant to your recipient, or whether you are sending emails too often? Ask. Do a survey and ask them what topics they’d like to hear more about, and how often they’d like to receive mailings from you.
Karyn, can’t agree with you more. Great research done to underline this. I recently thought it’s new survey time for my readership, so I was glad to hear you emphasize it as well. Thanks! Laurie http://www.creatingatwill.com
Hi, Laurie…The answers to this question seem to change over time. People now define “spam” as “receiving too many emails” even from someone they know. Our inboxes are overwhelming; whatever we can do to respect people’s time and their interests is always a good idea, don’t you think?