60 Seconds on Solving Unsub Nightmares
Industry standards tell us that email spam complaints need to be under 0.1%. Not much room for error, right?
And just think… where do a lot of spam complaints take place?
The recipient clicks the unsubscribe link in the email, only to be taken to a page with a drop-down menu.
In that menu?
An option to declare that the reason they’re unsubscribing is that they judge the email as spam.
Thing is, many people don’t REALLY think it’s spam…
They’re either in a rush and randomly click one of the options, or they’re just not sure what to click so they choose the spam option.
But what if there was a genius way to…
1) Reduce spam complaints practically overnight
2) Stop people from unsubscribing for good
3) Turn “unsubscribers” into buyers?
Here’s how to do it:
In your email service provider (ESP), there will often be an option to edit the page people are directed to when they click unsubscribe.
Yet what most email marketers don’t know is that you can redirect the URL to another page…
A page that DOESN’T give the option to report as spam AND is specifically designed to “hook” those unsubscribers back in.
You’ll still need to honor their request and inform them that they’ve successfully unsubscribed, of course. But the trick here is to supply people with an offer right underneath it (on the same page) that is impossible to ignore.
No matter which web hosting platform you’re with, you’ll be able to create a new page to be able to do this.
And on that page, you can choose to:
Provide the unsubscriber with a juicy, one-time discount
Downsell to a lower-ticket offer/product that’s more tempting for them
Promote an affiliate product that relates to your business
If your ESP doesn’t allow you to change the actual redirect page (such as Klaviyo), you can simply edit the form.
IDEA: insert a discount link in the form telling the user that when they click it, an automatic 30% coupon code will be applied to their checkout. You can create a specific discount for this in Klaviyo so you can track the performance.
Finally, if you’re a daily or multiple-times-a-week email sender, you can include a link in the emails themselves that gives the recipient an alternative to unsubscribing.
The link can say something like:
“I want to receive no more than one email per week.”
When clicked, it can update their tag in your ESP so you can give them what they want and make it a whole lot less likely for them to report you to those nasty spam demons…
Hope this has been helpful — when I heard about the strategy in the email mastermind group I’m part of, it kinda blew my mind!
Businesses are recouping thousands of $$ by implementing these clever yet simple unsubscribe workarounds.
Declan Davey
Health Copywriter and Marketing Strategist
