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