It’s not a question that you often ask yourself. You don’t want people to unsubscribe from your newsletter. You really don’t want your readers to leave. You want them to open each issue, to read and interact. And if there’s any decision to remove someone from your subscriber list, well most people want it to be theirs.
But stay with me. Something I’ve noticed on both author and business newsletters (and we’ll talk about what makes someone unsubscribe in a future blog) is that when I press the unsubscribe button, I’m not done.
Really?
The biggest violators of this are businesses. Once I go to their unsubscribe page, I often have to choose preferences, select lists, or leave all. Talk about frustrating. Even worse are the ones that ask me to log in to an account I may have only created and used once a few years ago.
However, for authors on one particular mailing list (I won’t name it, but it’s listed as a cheap alternative to others), once I click the unsubscribe button, I then have to click a SECOND button to unsubscribe. There’s been a few times that I thought I’d unsubscribed and closed the window and then discovered a week (a day!) later that I hadn’t, it’s not been a positive experience.
Why am I bringing this up? Because readers subscribe to newsletters often for getting a free book. And it may be months before they get to reading the free book. In the mean time, they’ll receive a bunch of newsletters, which they may or may not enjoy, and they may want to unsubscribe. If your unsubscribe process is too difficult (and yes, let’s be honest, in this day and age, clicking unsubscribe TWICE –once on the email and once on the webpage — is a lot for some people) they may mark these newsletters as spam.
We want our offboarding sequences to be as easy and straightforward as our onboarding ones. This way, the reader who leaves your newsletter may pick up another book later on, or even buy your next one, and perhaps, they’ll come back. But only if you keep the door easy to open, and close.