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Look at unsubscribes from your mailing list as a good thing – The Culling of the Herd

I know what you are thinking.  You spent a lot of time coming up with ideas of what you would send out to an email newsletter list.  You spent time setting up the mailing list functions in your auto-responder of choice.  And you spent some time maybe designing your newsletter with html.

You set up the sign up area on your site. And you are getting subscribers for your newsletter too.  You write the email to go out and you send it. And shortly after you send it, you get unsubscribes from your list.  What comes next is only natural.

Sitting in your office chair you start to beat yourself up.  What did I do wrong?  Was it the content?  Was it something I said? Why are people unsubscribing from the email list?  You are not feeling the love are you?

The worse thing you can do is ask those questions.  Well, maybe one should be ask.  ”Was it the content?”  Seriously people, having people unsubscribe from your mailing list is a good thing.

My own example of what happened this week

Let me give you my own real life example.  This week I sent out an email announcing our weekly twitter chat we are doing for Start Blogging Today with the hashtag #sbt10  I sent it out to my lists and within a few minutes I had at least 15 unsubscribes.

Not too long ago, I may have taken this as a slap in the face.  Now, I look at it as a natural culling of my email list.

What you want are qualified, productive people on your list

When building an email list, you want people on your list who want to hear from you.  You want people who are interested in learning what you have to say.  You don’t want unproductive or unqualified list members.  Remember, your lists are people you may want to sell something to.

Culling is a natural process.  If I can give you one more real life example, here it is.  I grew up on a Kansas cattle farm.  We would cull our herd yearly and the following definition really explains it all:

Culling is the process of removing animals from a group based on specific criteria. This is done in order to either reinforce certain desirable characteristics or to remove certain undesirable characteristics from the group.?

Look at your unsubscribes as culling out and removing the people from the group who are “undesirable” for one simple reason.  They are not going to buy from you.

Final Thoughts

Don’t look at unsubscribes from your email list as anything but a good thing.  Here is what a couple of people said on twitter when I mentioned that we should be happy with unsubscribes.

 

With the interest lately in doing an email newsletter and some of the comments I have been getting via email and on twitter, it might be time to do a short series on how to use an email newsletter in your marketing efforts.  Over the next few weeks, we will be doing some post on this subject.

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Published by: Grant Griffiths

Full post as published by Blawg for Profit on June 16, 2010 (boomark / email).