If the results of our informal webinar poll last week are any indication, about 2/3rds of nonprofits can’t or haven’t customized their email unsubscribe pages.
That’s the page that people get when they click “unsubscribe” or “manage email preferences” at the bottom of your mass emails.
Last week, I shared three great examples of unsubscribe pages.
Without customization, it’s all or nothing. People are either on your email list or they are off.
Now is that any way to establish a relationship with a donor, volunteer, or advocate for your work? Of course, not.
If you have customized the page, be sure that the options listed make sense to your average email subscriber. By default, a lot of email service providers list the segments or mailing list names that you set up to send mail to. While those naming conventions may make sense to you internally, they probably aren’t helpful externally.
If you can only make a few minor tweaks, I suggest that you provide either topic or frequency choices.
If you are a relatively heavy emailer (say, weekly or more often), giving people some level of control over the volume of email is smart.
If you do several different things and the people interested in those different things don’t overlap much, then allowing people to opt-out of content on the topic that doesn’t interest them as much could also work.
Whichever strategy you use, it will always be better than the all-or-nothing approach.
To find how you customize these pages for your email service provider, search “unsubscribe form” and your email provider’s name, e.g. “unsubscribe form MailChimp” and then look for ways to customize the form and the success or thank-you page that goes with it.
