If you’re using email marketing to reach out to your customers you’re probably getting a few email unsubscribes here and there. If you’re doing it right you should be getting way less than 1% each time you send out a campaign. And you might not even really look at this data (nobody wants to see negative stuff right?) But people unsubscribe for all sortsa reasons:

• They’re getting too much email in general and go on a huge unsubscribe kick
• You’re sending them email too frequently.
• You’re sending them email too infrequently.
• They are changing jobs and don’t want their boss to know they got personal email at work.
• They never signed up with you but their jokester friend signed them up. (Remember signing up your buddies to porn sites and AARP magazines back in the day? Still happens.)

You need to really make sure you lose as few of these folks as possible. We talked about the value of an email address before, so you need to keep them around as long as you can. So if you were getting .2% unsubscribes 5 months ago and now you’re up to .9% you should take a look at the following:

• Do you require double opt in? This would get around that nasty friend signing up a “friend” since they’ll need to click a link in an email to verify it’s really them.
• If you’re going to take the frequency of sending up a notch you need to tell them about it and ask them to opt in.
• You need to give them really great and useful content or the killer deal they’re expecting.
• Do you only send email twice a year? You should consider stepping that up so your recipients will remember who the heck you are.

As they’re unsubscribing it’s not a bad thing to ask them why they unsubscribed. You’d be amazed about how honest people can be.

As your list grows it’s a fact of life that you’ll start to see these unsubscribe rates rise and your open and click rates go down a little over time. But if it turns drastic too fast you need to take drastic measures!