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Email: Choices = happiness

October 8, 2007

I love email marketing (when done well).  Email is the only kind of advertising that people ask for.

There are a ton of best practices that most marketers miss that will make your emails more effective.  One of my favorites:

Add choices to the unsubscribe page.

Most unsubscribe links are an all-or-nothing deal. Take our newsletter, when we send it, or get nothing at all.  This annoys the reader, and hurts the marketer.

Why not offer a choice?  Would you like to get our email less often?  Would you like a different newsletter instead?  When you do this, you keep a huge percentage of subscribers who would have walked out the door.

Here’s an example from VacationsToGo.com:

In the email: "To temporarily suspend, reduce the
frequency of, or permanently cancel, these emails, click here".

You get this page:

Vacationstogo

It’s still easy to get off the list, but I bet they keep a ton of subscribers with these options

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Craig Rentmeester's Blog October 8, 2007 at 12:08 pm

More Choices = Better Marketing

Great marketing takes a lot of work. A marketer must understand how people will respond to different, controllable and uncontrollable factors at different points in a business transaction. Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing and CEO of Gas

Krista Neher October 11, 2007 at 3:58 pm

Good post – but there can also be too much choice (the temporarily suspend option seems slightly bizzare). I mean, just getting a coffee these days involves 8 different choices….. The key is to make the choices relevant and easy :)

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