7 Warning Signs You’re Annoying Your Email List

Email marketing is the lifeblood of a lot of small businesses, which makes sense too, as it’s continually ranked by marketers as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. But while it can be a driving force behind your business, it’s only as strong as your email list.

Simply put, if you’re annoying your list of contacts, your email won’t be as effective. Without a satisfied email list to send to, you don’t have a successful email marketing.

As I’ve said before, email marketing is (and will continue to be) the most important channel any business can use to continually get their name in front of their past and present clients. The long-term return is that your past clients will remember your name, bring you repeat business and recommend you to friends. Those are positive signals your recipients are sending you.

Bonus Content: Want to increase your email open rate? Download our Email Preflight Checklist and make sure your emails are fit to fly!

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But what about the negative signals? What are the warning signs your email list will send you when they’re not content with your communication strategy? What if they’re already giving you this feedback and you just don’t realize it?

That’s what this post is all about. Let’s get started.

7 Warning Signs You’re Annoying Your Email List

Let’s operate under some assumptions, including that the emails you’re sending your client list are coming from a good place and offer value to the readers. You’re writing content that’s meant to help, not sell, and you’re sending to people you actually know and not buying email lists. Finally, your email marketing is actually driving your long-term referral business strategy.

With these things out of the way, you can look at the direct and indirect ways your email list is letting you know if your emails are hitting the mark.

1: Send Frequency

Picking the right date and time will have more impact on the success of your long-term email plan than you might think. Are you sending emails twice a week? Maybe just once a quarter? Picking the right intervals can seem challenging, but I’ve got some insights for you.

Our friends at MarketingSherpa recently conducted a survey of U.S. adults. Specifically, they asked, “How often, if ever, would you like to receive promotional emails from companies that you do business with?”

Almost 90 percent of respondents said they’d prefer to hear from businesses at least monthly, if not more. Roughly 60 percent said at least weekly, which was also surprising.

 

Apply this reasoning to your own email marketing schedule. People want to receive emails at least once a month, if not more. Are you sending content with that frequency or do you fall short? For our clients, we’ve found that sending an email twice a month is a perfect balance, but we came to that conclusion after significant testing.

2: Negative Feedback

Depending on how vocal your client list is, you may get some great feedback directly from them. Good or bad, I’ve seen it all.

I’ve heard stories about people replying to emails saying the content isn’t relevant to them. That’s good feedback that lets you know that your core audience needs a different message than what you’re sending them.

This isn’t limited to just email replies either. People will take to Facebook and Twitter to voice their concerns over emails you’ve sent out. And if someone is really close to you, you might hear feedback in person, via text or over the phone as well.

The point here is that you should take this feedback into account when assessing your email marketing. Negative feedback in small doses might not be terrible, but if you’ve received more than a normal share of it all at once, you might give that email campaign a second glance.

3: Increase in Spam Reports

Getting reported as spam is definitely something you want to monitor. If you’re emailing past clients rather than purchased lists, you won’t have to worry about this too much. Regardless of who’s on your email list, this is important to understand.

So what is a spam report? Simply put, this is when someone reports an email that you sent to them as spam. While you might think this means that the email just gets moved to the spam folder, it actually has a greater impact.

If they receive more than a handful of complaints, most major email services will start blocking the IP address from which your emails are sent. This has a direct impact on your email deliverability and your ability to send any emails, not just emails to the account who reported you as spam.

It’s virtually impossible to avoid being reported as spam. Even with a 100 percent clean email list, some people will mark something as spam as a way to unsubscribe from an email. Avoid getting marked as spam by making it incredibly simple to unsubscribe from your emails.

For our clients, we make sure to include a link at the top of every campaign just to keep the spam reports to a minimum. Currently, our spam reports are at 0.03 percent, or 3 per every 10,000 emails sent. If you’re getting more than this, you might want to clean up your email list while you’re still able to send to it.

4: Dip in Open Rates

Open rates are a great way to track whether or not you’re annoying your email list. Whenever one of your emails is opened, the opener is letting you know that they trust you, you have a good subject line, and the content you sent them is relevant.

While this is more of an indirect indicator that’s subject to vary with every email campaign, it’s a good baseline to use. If the past three email campaigns you’ve sent have yielded open rates of 18 percent, 22 percent, and 21 percent, you can assume that a 20 percent open rate baseline is fairly consistent. However, if the next campaign you send drops down to 12 percent, it’s time to dig into what went wrong.

It could just be a one-off problem or a bump in the road. Maybe you sent it on a new day or time that didn’t work out. Perhaps you misspelled something in the subject line. Whatever the case might be, nail down the problem and correct for future emails.

Also read:

• 2015 Email Marketing Stats and Best Practices Decoded
• Understanding the Impact of Open Rates on Email Marketing

5: Click-Through Rates

Some emails you send are meant to drive a response in the form of a click. For example, sometimes we’ll send out an invitation to a webinar or a link to a downloadable new how-to guide. The click-through rate is the number of people who clicked through on the email after opening it.

As I’ve stated in an earlier post, “Not every email is meant to generate click-throughs. Some emails are transaction-related, some are informational, others are meant to be forwarded along, and some emails are meant to generate click-throughs to specific landing pages. That means that across the board, each type of email you send will probably have a different click-through average based on your desired call-to-action.”

Just like email open rates, get a good baseline for your click-through rate. If you see a dip in typical click-throughs, take time to investigate. If the email with a decreased percentage was purely informative in nature and not one requiring someone to click on anything, then don’t worry. But if your success is measured by how much traffic you can generate from each email sent, take a closer look at what changed.

Bonus Content: Want to increase your email open rate? Download our Email Preflight Checklist and make sure your emails are fit to fly!

Download Now

6: Unsubscribes

Unsubscribes are a lot more important than you might think. The last thing you want is for someone to unsubscribe to your emails; how often people unsubscribe is a great gauge of the effectiveness of your emails.

When people unsubscribe from emails, they’re sending you the message that they don’t like what you’re sending, you’re sending way too much information, they don’t know why they’re getting something from you, or some combination of the above.

It’s completely normal to get a few email unsubscribes for every campaign you send out. Unsubscribes are also better than being marked as spam, as I mentioned above. However, if you see a huge jump from week to week, it might be time to re-evaluate your emails to figure out the problem.

If you’re sending valuable content at an acceptable frequency, rest assured you’ll keep your recipients happy and your unsubscribe rates low. Our customers see a less than 0.3 percent unsubscribe rate and an even lower spam report rate. And remember to continue adding new contacts to your email list. It will help lessen the loss of an email subscriber.

7: Unsubscribe Ratio

Lastly, we have a metric that we’ve been using in-house lately. For the emails we send to our prospects, click-through rate is an important measure of success. We’ve started comparing the click-through rate of emails and the number of unsubscribes. We call this the unsubscribe ratio.

For example, let’s say we sent an email to 1,000 people. Two hundred individuals opened it and 50 people clicked on it, giving us a 20 percent open rate and a 5 percent click-through rate. However, we also had 20 people unsubscribe from that same email. Taking the 50 clicks and dividing it by the 20 unsubscribes, we get a 2.5 percent unsubscribe ratio.

We’ve found that emails with an unsubscribe ratio of 1.0 or greater are a success. However, if they have a less than 1.0 ratio, that means we had more people unsubscribe then click, which isn’t good for business.

When you start to dig deeper into your email marketing metrics, you can identify trends that are specific to your own business to help gauge the effectiveness of your work.

Wrap-up

People are generally happy to receive emails from businesses they like, and when used correctly, they can provide long-term returns in the form of repeat and referral business.

However, without an email list to send to, you won’t be getting the benefits of email for your business. Whether directly or indirectly, you can assess the happiness of your email recipients using the seven ways discussed above. Ultimately, email is all about you and your business, but the road to that ROI is strictly dictated by the happiness of your email list.

Email marketing is a powerful vehicle for delivering messages directly to your target audience and it’s what we do for our clients. Need help? Let us do the work for you.