EP. 4- Unsubscribes are GOOD?!?! Email MYTH busted! l Jay’s Scoop

Foreign. Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

I'm excited for today's episode of do this, not that. Today we're talking about unsubscribes. Unsubscribes. But what we're really talking about is why unsubscribes are good, not bad. That's right.

I think unsubscribes from your email campaigns are a win and not a loss. Now, let me explain what we're talking about when we talk about unsubscribes.

I don't care if you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, when you send out an email campaign, you get unsubscribes. People click on the link, take me off the list. I don't want to be on here anymore. I unsubscribe. You also sometimes get the nasty gram.

Why you send this to me? I never asked for this. They forget, they opted in. This thing's probably illegal, which it's not. And.

And they say you're a horrible person and all these different things. Now, most marketers track their unsubscribes, and they do the opposite of what they should be doing, right?

What happens is they'll send out a campaign, and then they'll get back more unsubscribes than what they normally get back on previous campaigns. And what they do is they react, oh, no, we're getting a lot more unsubscribes. We're sending out too much email.

Or we sent out something that annoyed people, okay? And they change what they're doing. They send less email, okay? Or they go back to what they used to send, right?

Or they send out a campaign and someone sends in the nasty gram and it says, I hate you. Take me off this list. You're a horrible person. And somehow that gets circulated within your company.

It goes to the CEO, the senior vice president, whatever, and then it makes its way back down to you. And they're like, what is this? Why are we getting emails like this? And then what do we do? We go, oh, no, stop. We're sending out too much email.

Look at how angry everybody is. Look at this email we got. We got this nasty gram. We're doing something wrong. And that is the epic fail in marketing. Here's the way it works.

94% of people that unsubscribed have not opened or clicked on one of your emails in over six months. That's kind of the standard metric. 94% of people that unsubscribe have not opened or clicked on one of your emails in over six months.

What does that mean in English? It means they don't care about you or your company. They have forgotten about you. You are irrelevant. Right?

People unsubscribe for basically two reasons. Two reasons. Here's what happens. You say, okay, we're going to try something new. We're going to do a new type of email.

And what we're going to do is in this email, for the first time, you're going to put an emoji in the subject line. Okay? Or maybe you're going to make the subject line into a question. You've never done a question subject line before.

You've always just written regular subject lines. But now you're going to do a question subject line, something written in a question form.

And so it's a new thing for your marketing, and you send it out. So what happens when you try something new?

People that have been ignoring you because you're wallpaper to them, they haven't been seeing, quote, unquote, seeing your emails because you're just scrolling by it. You did something new, and all of a sudden your email stood out to them. They're like, oh, I didn't even know I'm still on this list.

And they open it up, okay? They open it up and then they say, you know what? I'm not in the market for this anymore. I already bought this thing. Or my life changed.

I don't need this anymore. And they unsubscribe, okay? So they're unsubscribing because you did something good.

They're unsubscribing because they noticed you for the first time in forever. In forever. So that was good. Now, what's the second reason people unsubscribe?

The second reason people unsubscribe, it's like, let's say you want to go on a diet. So what's the first thing everybody does when they go on a diet? The first thing they do is they go to their refrigerator. Okay?

You go to your refrigerator and you open it up and you're like, oh, my God, look at all the disgustingness. I'm a farm animal. I need to get rid of 90% of the food in my refrigerator. I can eat none of this ever again.

And you go in there and you get rid of all of this stuff and you throw it all out. And by the way, 30 days later, you put it back in your fridge and you're still a farm animal. And that's fine. Me, too. I am great.

But we do the same thing with email. We do, okay? We go, oh, my God, I'm getting too many email. My life is out of control. I need to better organize my life. I need a total redo. Whatever.

So what do you do? You go to your inbox. You're like, I'm going to unsubscribe from 15 things right now that I just don't read.

And they go click, click, click, click, click. And they unsubscribe. It's not because you sent out one more email this month. It's not because, oh, you have a conference coming up.

You're trying to sell one more conference promo and just put them over the top. No, the person is trying to clean out their lives or they had a bad day. Right? And that, by the way, is what the nasty gram is. If when somebody.

When somebody gets an email and they decide, I'm going to write back a nasty gram. Right. You are the worst human being alive. You should die. I hate you. Blah, blah, blah.

And this whole horrible unsubscribe that we receive as marketers, and we get it, we go, oh, my God, we got to slow down. We're sending out too much email. We got this one email. No, that person who sent that one email is looney Tunes, okay?

They're having an epically bad day. I feel bad for them, whatever's going on in their lives.

But for you to be a keyboard commando and send an email like that, it has nothing to do with that email that you sent, that you're selling a pair of socks or accounting software has nothing to do with what you just said. Has everything to do with that person being in a strange place in their life. And I hope it all works out for them.

You cannot change your marketing plans. You can't be dictated by the loudest voice in the room. You cannot. That is not the way to successful marketing.

Now, here's the most important piece, okay? When you get an unsubscribe, people think it hurts your deliverability. They think it hurts your ability to go into the inbox.

That if you get a lot of unsubscribes, you will wind up in the junk folder. Or the spam folder. That is the opposite of true. There's a big difference between unsubscribe and a spam complaint.

When someone clicks on the spam complaint button, Spam clients are really bad. They will impact your deliverability, but unsubscribes do not. They actually help your deliverability. Why? Two big reasons. Number one. Okay.

Number one, when someone takes themselves off your list, they are a boat anchor in your database. They generally not opening, clicking anything.

So when they remove themselves, removing a dead, not dead, but a dead address, essentially, that is just going nowhere, doing nothing in your database. And this improves your metrics.

But also what people don't realize is when someone gets an email and they open it and then they click on the unsubscribe link, the system itself doesn't really understand what they opened and clicked, what they were doing. They just know from an engagement standpoint, there was an open generated and there was a click generated.

And that is actually technically engagement. So ironically, when someone unsubscribes, it actually helps your deliverability. It doesn't hurt it.

So what I'm here to tell you is you don't want a radical increase in your unsubscribes. That's never good. But don't let more unsubscribes cause you to change your marketing programs.

Definitely don't let a nasty gram cause you to change your. Your marketing plans, because that is the opposite of what we should be doing. Oh, that's like a massive soapbox I was just standing on.

All right, and now let's talk about the segment that we called, since you didn't ask. And for any new listeners, this is bananas.

So this is where I talk about things that have nothing to do with marketing or business, just whatever going on in my head, in my life. And yes, I'll tell you what's on my mind, which is so random.

I have teenage kids and they were telling me how they were at some sort of amusement park and they were telling me about the rides they were going on. It reminded me of when I can't go on rides. I can't. I cannot even go on a merry. I'll throw up. If I go on a merry go round, I will. I will throw up.

It's horrendous. I cannot go on any rides. I know none of you care, but I'll tell you what happened to me and how I got so scarred by this.

So when I was younger, I think I was 10, and I was at camp and we went on this trip to an amusement park, I'll never forget this because it scarred me for the rest of my life. And I didn't know I couldn't go on rides. I didn't know that. I was, like, a disaster. So we go there, and everyone's like, what do you want to go on?

What do you want to go on? I'm like, I don't know. So you go, let's go on Gravitron.

So I don't know what they call it now, but Gravitron is that ride where it goes in a circle really, really, really fast. And you get sucked against the wall, and then the bottom kind of falls out, right?

And you're sucked against the wall and you can't move, and it's spinning super fast in a circle. So let's go and Gravitron. I'm like, cool. That looks cool. So I go on.

You put yourself on the wall, start spinning, and then, you know, it starts going. I'm like, oh, no, this isn't good. I don't feel well. This is not heading in the right direction. I'm like, 10. I'm little, and I'm like, oh, no.

And then. So then it was horrible. So all of a sudden, it was going really fast, and I throw up. Oh, my God. I throw up in the middle of the ride.

But then only did I throw up. But we were going so fast on the ride that I hit the guy, this older man right next to me. Because, like, whoop. Like, right next to me, it hit him.

And then they had to stop the ride. They get, like, hoses, whatever. And this guy was pissed, and he looks at me, and he was a scary dude. And he go. He grabs my arm.

I don't know where any, like, adult supervision was, but this is what happened. He grabs my arm. It's like, scarred me. And he drags me, basically. He goes, you're coming me. I go, where are we going?

And he takes me to the gift shop, okay. And he goes, you're buying me new clothes. You're buying me new clothes. And I'm like, 10.

I don't know what money I had in my pocket, but it was enough to get this man a new shirt. And so I had to buy this older man a shirt because his other one had vomit on it. And he was so angry at me.

What a horrible, horrible experience that was. So now I was thinking about this. My kids are at this amusement park, and this is what was on my mind. I don't know.

This is the segment of this thing that just goes off the rails. Anyway, don't go on Gravitron, okay? Wherever you are, don't get upset by unsubscribes. And thanks for checking out the podcast. You did it.

You made it to the end. Nice, but the party's not over.

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