#40: Keep Your List Happy by Using an Email Preferences Center

Sep 30, 2018 | Marketing / Automation, Office Operations

This month’s theme is List-Building and I’ve showed you how to build your list using a quiz, a challenge, my most popular freebie (forms), and even a list builder on steroids – giveaways!

Now that you have worked really hard building your list, you need to make sure those who are on your list are kept HAPPY! You can do this by implementing an email preferences center.

Using an email preferences center provides an easy way for your subscribers to manage their email and it cuts down your unsubscribe rate. Did you know that industry average is about 1%? That means if you have a list of 1,000 subscribers, every time you send an email, you may get 10 opt outs!

And during a launch or other sales promotion, when you are sending out a lot of emails, that can jump to 3%! But there’s a lot you can do to keep your subscribers happy at every touch point you have with them and what has helped me keep my average unsubscribe rate at a very low .2%.

I show you how to do it and give you a behind-the-scenes look at my email preferences center in this quick video.

This is Lisa Wells and welcome to Systems Sunday. We are wrapping up our theme for the month, which was list-building, and today’s lesson is how to keep your list happy by making it easy for your subscribers to manage their email communication using an email preferences center.

Why do you need an email prefs center?

First, it provides an easy way for your subscribers to manage their email (what they get and how often they get it). It also cuts down on the unsubscribe rate. The industry average is about 1%. So if you have a list of 1,000 people, every time you send a broadcast, on average, about 10 people will unsubscribe. I don’t know about you, but I take unsubscribes and opt-outs kind of personally, so I try to make it easy for my list to unsubscribe and make choices about what they want from me.

You can do this with time-based, meaning, this type of preference center gives your subscribers the option to receive email less often, maybe on a specific cadence, or a chance to take a set break from receiving email for a set amount of time.

There is also content-based, this is what I do. A content-based preference center lets them pick the types of communication that they do or do not want you to send them.

And then there’s campaign-based and I’m going to show you an example of that.

Now, the reason why people opt-out, “Too many emails” is usually #1 or #2 on the list year after year. So having a time-based preference, lets them choose how often, where someone can choose to receive less or more emails, is great. So if you send a weekly newsletter, they can instead opt for a monthly digest. This is something you can survey your list and just ask. When I surveyed my people years ago, I had a monthly newsletter and asked if they wanted to keep getting it monthly or would they rather get it twice monthly, I have about 50/50. That didn’t help me make any business decisions, but if you see a clear trend or an overwhelming majority who wanted something from you, it may be something to think about.

Having a content-based preferences center lets your subscribers choose the how – what they get from you – and is great for those who segment their list.

And then we have campaign-based. Remember that stat I showed you earlier, where the average opt-out rate for an email was 1%? Well, during a launch when people are sending LOTS of emails, the unsubscribe percentage could go up to around 3%. Again, if you have 1,000 on your list, you might lose 30 people for each “sales” email you send. What I like to do is add a way to opt-out of the campaign.

Having a campaign-based opt-out mitigates the jump in opt-outs during a launch or sales campaign. Let me show you what I have…

[Demo]

Here is an invitation sequence, so during a launch, you are getting an email every couple of days or so throughout the launch or the sales period. What I like to do is at the bottom of the email, I like to add, “I only do this … once in a while, if you’d rather not get these, click here” and then I have a way for them to opt-out of that one campaign but not out of my main list.

Let me show you the back end of the email preferences center. Here’s a typical broadcast email and usually all of the emails will have at the very bottom “I only want to send you what you’re interested in, update your settings in my email preferences center.” When they click on this link, it goes to a page in my Infusionsoft where they can adjust their settings and segment themselves.

In the back-end, in Infusionsoft, here’s the landing page, once they click on it, the decision diamonds act to tag them. And it tags them “yes” or “no.” Now when I send something out, I just select based on those tags.

Catch up on previous List-Building Systems episodes + resources mentioned in the video:

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