In our recent post on how to lower your unsubscribe rate, our final tip was to offer different subscription options. Today, we’ll go into more detail on why subscription options are important to offer and what those options should look like.

Your goals and your customers’ goals as they relate to email marketing are more closely aligned than you might think. You want them to receive your emails because they’ll purchase more, and they signed up to receive your emails because they want to purchase more. It’s a win-win. The vast majority of your subscribers likely opted in for one or more of the following reasons:

They want to stay in the loop on your products/services

They want deals on your products/services

They love/are inspired by your content

Therefore, if a customer chooses to unsubscribe, it may mean that you’re not delivering the content he or she was expecting, or that you’re emailing too frequently/at poor times. Rather than only offering a blanket unsubscribe- which a customer may want and which you are legally required to offer, we suggest having additional subscription options. This way, you’ll come closer to meeting email expectations, plus you’ll get fewer unsubscribes. Here are the options you should have:

Frequency

Ideally, you should have three frequency options as an alternative to your regular emails — weekly, biweekly, and monthly. These newsletters should corral the most important content from your original emails into one piece.

Content Category

If you’re sending emails about products, company information, and blog posts, that may be too much for some of your less evangelistic customers. At the minimum, you should offer the option to subscribe to one type of email — blog posts, informational emails, or product-based emails. However, we recommend taking that one step further and offering specific types of product emails. This allows customers to create truly customized email experiences for themselves. These can be categorized by new products, sale items, women’s/men’s items, and collections. Alternatively, they can be categorized by categories such as shirts, shoes, and pants. Let your customers simply check off boxes for products or types of products about which they want to receive emails.

Deals and Promotions

If the customer signed up only to receive deals on your products, that may be the only content that’s appealing to them. Therefore, we recommend offering the option to receive emails only about sales and promotions. If the rest is noise to this customer anyway, this will help improve your open and click-through rates.

All of the above

Of course, the best case scenario is offering all of the previously mentioned options. The more a customer has agency in the types of emails he or she receives, the more he or she will appreciate the communications when they come.

Need help setting up subscription options? Contact ahoy!