When it comes to email marketing, email marketers often find themselves forced to accept a certain amount of expected email list depreciation but when in a particular year, your email list dwindles down more and more due to unsubscribes, it’s time you do something about it. Unsubscribes are, in very technical terms, a huge bummer. Certainly, a certain amount of self-scrubbing is good for any email list, but if your email list thins to a few dozens of people then you have a problem and you need to do something about saving the remaining people on your email list.

If you have an email list that used to convert up until a few weeks or months ago then for sure, you are doing something wrong and you need to radically reduce the amount of email unsubscribes you experience. Any email marketing strategy needs to contain certain elements and implementing them now and tracking the progress and effect they have on your unsubscribe rates can be a starting point for you to revive your dying list of subscribers.

The top 9 ways to reduce your email unsubscribe rates

1. Find a way to segment your email list

Irrespective of what channels you adopted to create your email list, for an email list to work, you need to know what kind of content you send to the different people on the list. This requires you to know the people on your email list dividing the people on the list into specific groups to make sure you only send relevant materials to the people on the list. Email segmentation is important because it allows you to deliver only the most relevant, customized content to your subscribers. The more specific your segments get, the more you become able to deliver content that speaks directly to their interests, making you a fixture in their inbox rather than a source of clutter.

2. Map your content

Once you know something about your subscribers and what they expect from you, you can manually map your content assets to their behaviors. One way to do so is to create a Google Doc or use an Excel spreadsheet that allows you to organize which content will be sent to which segments of your audience, and at what point. Mapping relevant content to your list segments gives your subscribers the proper email content and ensures everything you send to them is as relevant as possible, decreasing your instances of unsubscribes due to irrelevant content.

3. Offer customized email frequency

Just as you should let your subscribers select the types of emails they receive, you should also allow them to adjust to the frequency at which you send out content so you can communicate with them whether it’s multiple times a day or just once a month. This prevents you from unknowingly bombarding their inbox or leaving it too scarce for their tastes. One way to do this is to send an email to your subscribers and ask them to identify their ideal sending frequency and email type.

4. Perform email frequency testing

Any Internet marketing strategy needs testing and email marketing is no different. Because not all of your subscribers will tell you how often they like to be emailed by you, be proactive and perform email frequency tests to determine the optimal frequency with which to send email communications. If you haven’t performed an email sending frequency test, do it now.

5. Offer a different communication method

If an email recipient is ready to unsubscribe, they might love your content but suffer from inbox overload. Give them other options for communication including SMS, RSS, your social media networks, your company blog or any of the other places you let your audience know about the important developments of your business or company.

6. Have a regular email sending schedule

To manage expectations in the long term, you need to set expectations up front. Using a hypothetical example here, if you send an email communication every day at 11:00 EST on the dot, when your subscribers understand when they will be getting emails from you, there’s less of a chance your email will surprise them when they’re busy, cranky or overwhelmed. As such, set their expectations right from the time they opt in to your emails about when they’ll receive emails from you and do your best to live up to that promise.

7. Leverage exclusivity

When it comes to email marketing, in addition to have impeccable timing, you also need to keep your subscribers from unsubscribing. One way to do this is offer exclusive deals via your emails. Not only will this prevent your subscribers from unsubscribing for fear of losing out in offers, they might also redeem some of your exclusive offers and recommend you to their peers.

8. Make sure your emails don’t load slowly

This is an absolutely important consideration. If you rely on email marketing for your business, you need to check if your emails quickly in the different email browsers and on mobile devices. Don’t include in any of your emails images that are too big to load quickly, design elements that don’t render well on mobile devices and any other elements that make reading your emails a bad experience.

9. Feedback is important

Feedback from your subscribers is important in email marketing. Irrespective of how much time you invest in designing your email marketing strategy, some people will still unsubscribe from your emails. Take that opportunity to solicit feedback from them and then listen to what they have to say. Soliciting feedback from unsubscribes won’t help you save that email recipient but it will most definitely help you prevent future subscribers from leaving.