The question of whether or not to follow up with a person after they’ve received marketing emails from you is one that is often discussed among email marketers. While most would agree that an email conversation is the best way to go about nurturing a potential client, it’s not always the most practical solution.
What if we told you there was an easy way to track the results of your efforts without leaving the comfort of your email marketing platform?
You might be tempted to think that the best way to find out whether or not you should pursue a click through on an unsubscribe link is to simply check your email traffic. The truth is that, with some clever segmentation and analytics, you can get an idea of the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign without having to leave the platform.
The Search for the Best Unsubscribe Link
The first step towards measuring the success of your email marketing campaign is to find the best way to prompt a user to take action. This action could be as simple as signing up for your newsletter, subscribing to your blog, or taking a survey.
Each of these three options has its perks. If you’ve got the sign-up rate for a newsletter or a blog you can rest assured that you’re capturing an audience, you can track the success of your blog, and you’ve got the data to prove it.
The downside is that these options require a bit of user intervention. After all, what’s the point in having an unsubscribe link if no one is going to take the time to unsubscribe?
The answer might surprise you. To get the best results from your email marketing campaign you want to give your audience as little friction as possible when it comes to taking action. As a marketer, you want to make sure that every action a person takes is one that is as easy as possible for you to track.
How to Measure the Success of Your Email Marketing Campaign
Now that you’ve got your unsubscribe link it’s a matter of putting the pieces together to see exactly what happened. The first step is to look at the results of your online advertising campaign.
If you ran adverts on social media then you’ll want to consider the effect that that had on your email marketing results. If a person read an article about your product or service and then went on to click on an ad on a social media platform, did that help or hinder your email marketing results?
You might be tempted to think that adverts on social media are completely disconnected from your email marketing results. The truth is that they’re not. When somebody clicks on an ad on social media, that action usually leads to an email being opened and hopefully, a click through to a marketing platform.
By looking at your ads on different platforms, you’ll get a good idea of the effect that online advertising on social media had. Was someone who saw an ad on Instagram more or less likely to click on an email link compared to someone who saw the same ad on Facebook?
What’s an Unsubscribe Link?
An unsubscribe link is an email signature that allows a person to unsubscribe from your email newsletter, blog, or social media channels at any time. You can use tools like HiPPO (high-performance purchase optimization) to get notified when a user interacts with your content (clicks a link, downloads a file, or makes a purchase).
When a person unsubscribes from your email newsletter, blog, or social media channels you’ll want to record that event and keep track of all the details. Remember, you’re not limited to just these mediums. You can use an unsubscribe link for all the platforms you use for marketing.
The Importance of User Testing
User testing is how web designers, developers, and digital marketers find out what works and what doesn’t with a particular web page or feature before it goes live. The same concept applies to your email marketing campaigns. You’re developing a piece of content or a new feature for your site, and you want to be sure that when presented to real people it meets your needs and performs as you expect.
The importance of user testing shouldn’t be understated. Even the most successful businesses occasionally find that a process or feature they use doesn’t work as well in practice as it did in theory. The only way to find out if this is the case is by testing it with a small group of users before going live with the new version of the product.
How to Optimize Your Unsubscribe Links
Once you’ve got your data, the next step is to consider what you can do to make the most of your unsubscribe links. You want to direct potential subscribers to the most relevant content or the sale of the day. To achieve this, you can:
Link to the Home Page
The home page of your site is the landing page that someone visits after they’ve arrived at your address via a search engine or through a social media platform. Usually, this page will include a small collection of featured products, a brief summary of the content on the page, and a call for action (i.e. to read more, subscribe, or make a purchase).
The most effective way to encourage users to click on an unsubscribe link is to provide them with a convenient way to get back to the homepage. To do this, simply link back to the home page in your email signature. For example, if a person clicks on a blog post heading “Top 5 Tools for Marketers,” they’ll be taken to a page with that post’s content and a link back to the homepage.
Personalized Subscription Notifications
There are many reasons why you might want to offer users the option of subscribing to your email lists or blog without having to give out their email address upfront. The primary reason is to stay within the law. Without giving out your email address, you’re not allowed to spam a person or send them email messages without their explicit permission. You can, however, use a service like AWeber to send out automated personal messages whenever someone signs up for a particular list or blog. This feature can come in handy when you want to remind a user about a forthcoming launch or an event that relates to your content. As an added bonus, you can also use this feature to send out short personalized messages to users who’ve expressed an interest in your products or services.
Reduce the Number of Links to Non-Essential Content
Just because a person unsubscribed from your email newsletter, blog, or social media channels doesn’t mean that they want to visit every single one of your affiliate partner’s websites. Linking to irrelevant content just to get a few more clicks is a quick way to lose a potential customer. When you send out a new blog post or a new product announcement you can consider including a short description of the key points and/or offering a convenient resource for more information.
Use Technology
If you’re really determined to see if a click through to an unsubscribe link is worth pursuing, you might want to look into technology that can give you an idea of the effect that offline advertising had. The UK Business Agency for Online Marketing and SEO recently reported that 74% of consumers would rather receive marketing emails when they’re on their phones. In light of this, you might want to consider using technologies like HubSpot which, at a minimum, allows you to see the results of your email marketing campaign in real time.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that if you want to see if there’s value in encouraging users to take a click through to an unsubscribe link you can use automated email responses like AWeber to capture all the necessary details or you can use an analytics tool to track the results of your offline advertising efforts. In either case, you’ll be able to determine whether or not an email follow-up is necessary.