How to Avoid the Dreaded 'Unsubscribe' Button

To promote an e-newsletter effectively you need to take a multipronged approach. Firstly, you should have a call to action (CTA) on each of your website’s pages (blog posts, thank you pages and landing pages included). The CTA should persuade visitors to sign up to your e-newsletter to find out more about the relevant topic. If you have any ebooks, you could include a similar CTA at the end of it.

If you already have an existing mailing list, you need to be using your emails to recommend that subscribers also sign up for your newsletter to keep up to date with the latest financial news, and making the content as shareable as possible.

If you're worried, however, that you're emailing out too often and your unsubscribe rates are growing, then perhaps it's time too look at how often you send out.

Mass mailings, online or paper-based, begin to irritate when they’re seen as irrelevant. If you send out lots of marketing information without having something truly interesting for the customer, you’re likely to get a poor ROI. Therefore, a valid strategy would be to send marketing information only whenever you have something of relevance to say to a customer; content that will be of value to them at that particular moment.

If you distribute a regular and informative newsletter, or make frequent and useful blog postings, then you may be able to incorporate this content into other channels. Again, make sure you’ve got something truly enticing to share, then seed it out across all your marketing channels.

How much information should my sign up form ask for?

When creating a sign up form for your business, it can be tempting to request multiple pieces of information to construct a detailed picture of the people your company is attracting. Several studies have shown, however, that often a shorter form will result in a higher number of conversions. Many users will often be wary of giving too much information away or will simply close the page if they see a long, complex form.

You need to decide what information is crucial to your business in order to re-engage users at a later stage. This is highly dependent on the type of sign up you’re after. If your aim is to get users onto a mailing list, then just their email address and perhaps their name should be sufficient. The simpler it is to sign up, the more likely it is they will enter their details.

If your business revolves around shipping physical products, it can seem sensible to request their delivery details straight away. However it may be wise to utilise “Lazy Registration”, and allow users to browse at their leisure and postpone the request for details until the point of sale. Even for web-based products or services, allowing the user to explore first can be advantageous. In this case, a Carrot & Stick style motivation may be applied, by providing the user a benefit to registration. For example, allowing them 30 minutes of free access to your service, after which they are presented with the choice to register in order to save and continue their progress.