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Minimizing Bounces and Unsubscribes

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Relevant content

In this section, we're going to talk about minimizing bounces and unsubscribes through relevant content. We've spoken about this briefly before, but it's worth reiterating again.

  • The content of your email: Is it aligned to the persona you have in mind? The previous examples talked about the right time of day to send to your various different people. Now, we're talking about, what about what is within what you're sending them? Is the content aligned with their needs, and is it aligned with what they signed up for?
  • Subject line and content: Your subject line should very closely mirror the content in the email. You can see from this example a marketing blog round up then follows on immediately with, here are the blog posts. He's what you signed up for, here it is. No confusion, no mistrust.
  • Subscriber expectations: Does your email cadence and frequency match out with recipient expect and signed up for. Again, if they signed up to receive a weekly email, and you don't send it to them weekly, this develops mistrust and also reduces the effectiveness of your brand. Give them exactly what they've asked for, and if you need to change that in the future, communicate that with them.

Monitoring for bounces and unsubscribes

Next, we'll talk about monitoring for bounces and unsubscribes. After every email campaign, it's important to monitor the metrics and how the email actually performed, your clicks, your opens, your complaints, and your conversions.

The good metrics and the bad metrics as we've spoken of before. Compare the result to previous campaigns as this may show if there was a problem. Review campaign open and click dips and understand what actually impacts the campaign conversion. It's also helpful instead of looking at one single email send compared to the next email send, to look at it over a time period.

What happened in this three months of blog emails compared to this three months of blog emails? You may identify the larger trends that are really affecting conversions. So, as well as that, if the content of your email wasn't relevant, it may have caused users to unsubscribe. Make sure this is the fact.

Go in, read that email, compare the subject line to preview text to the content. Did you, either accidentally or deliberately mislead? And then finally, monitor for deliverability issues, including bounces.

Preference center

A preference center is a more advanced unsubscribe page. When a user clicks unsubscribe, instead of instantly removing them from all of your email lists, you can provide a way for them to change the types of emails they receive and how often.

Here's an example from HubSpot. When you click unsubscribe, you are brought to this page where you select or deselect the type of emails you want to receive and also the frequency at which you would like to receive them. It does require a little more effort to maintain, but it is great to have more nuanced options for people not to have just an all or nothing opt-in from you.

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Please note that the module slides are designed to work in collaboration with the module transcript document. It is recommended that you use both resources simultaneously.

Digital Marketing Resources:

Andrea Francis

Inbound marketing manager @ Poppulo

  • Inbound marketing manager in employee communications technology 
  • Worked at Relayr as a senior marketing manager, creating and implementing a global inbound marketing strategy
  • Worked with Hubspot as a marketing manager and funnel optimization specialist focusing on converting leads to qualified leads for the EMEA region
  • Content marketing and blogging with various SaaS startups at Startupbootcamp Amsterdam

The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful. While relevant to this module, you will not be assessed on this content.

You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library

ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

Email Marketing
Andrea Francis
Skills Expert

This module begins with the fundamentals of email marketing and how the concepts of segmentation, personalization, timing, engagement, and the legislation and regulations surrounding data protection underpin an effective email marketing strategy. The module introduces key email marketing tools and techniques and explores subscriber list and email design best practices. It covers how to create, test, and optimize an email campaign that maximizes email open and click rates and provides an overview of the value provided by marketing automation tools.