"I like you, but only as a friend": Managing email unsubscribes gracefully

At at least one point in our lives, we've probably all heard the dreaded line in dating situations where the other person says, "I like you, but only as a friend." We face that type of situation as marketers when it comes to our email lists...and frankly I think most companies do an awful job of handling it.

How do you manage unsubscribes from your email lists? I'm not talking about from a technical or even a user experience standpoint, although I covered that in a past post. What I mean here is the list management strategy -- trying to give users what they want. Do you unsubscribe them from everything? Or do you give them options?

First let's look at a best practice in email marketing -- segmentation. It's important to choose the people on your email list who will find a message relevant, and only send to those users. Whenever possible, you shouldn't send email messages to your entire list when you can use demographics and behavioral data to slice the list. Segmentation often isn't easy technically. But it's worth the effort, because ultimately you'll be sending your users emails that are more relevant.

Unsubscribes shouldn't be any different than segmentation, in that you should be mindful that some users don't want to hear from you too often!

Here's an example: Let's say you're a retailer who sends out sale offers once every week. I like your store and I shop there a few times a year, but I don't care to know about weekly sales. The weekly email is getting annoying, so I click the Unsubscribe link.

What happens next? With most retailers, the link would take me to a page where I'd click a button and I'd be removed from the list. Wonderful...that's what I wanted, right? Yes...sort of.

Think about it. I didn't really want to unsubscribe. I still like your store and I still plan to shop there. I just don't need weekly emails. But if you contacted me once a month with your best deals, or twice a year with your biggest bargains and specials, that would be perfectly appropriate. That's what I really want. (Or in dating lingo, "Don't crowd me. Give me some space. I'm not ready to go into that deep of a relationship with you, but I'm still happy to hang out with you.")

Ideally your Unsubscribe page would have several options. Perhaps the options would look something like this:

• Unsubscribe me from this email list.
• I like your emails, but they're coming too frequently. Please email me once a month.
• Only email me twice a year when you have your semi-annual sales.
  

This approach accomplishes several things:

1. You're keeping valuable customers on your email list, thus increasing their lifetime value.
2. You're reducing your own costs for email deployment, since you're not sending out unnecessary emails to people who don't want them so frequently.
3. You're empowering the user. You're showing them you listen. Wow...pretty powerful stuff for a brand.

In those awkward dating situations, often a person will come to the conclusion that "Having you as a friend is better than not having you in my life at all." So as digital marketers, we need to get comfortable with the idea that having someone on your list for a couple messages a year is better than not having them at all.

That's a really great question!

One of the standard best practices for a webcast dictates that the moderator should have a list of seed questions available for the Q&A session. Sometimes people call them planted questions, canned questions, etc., but the concept is the same. When it comes time for Q&A, if the audience isn't asking many questions or the questions aren't good enough quality, the moderator can fall back on their list of seed questions to get the discussion started. Sometimes we use them, other times we don't -- but it's an important safety net because you never know how many audience questions will come in during a live event. A few days before each webcast, we ask each presenter to come up with at least a couple, just in case we need them.

I've noticed the strangest thing when it comes to seed questions. In situations when we need to turn to the list of seed questions, the moderator will read the question to the audience. More often than not, the presenter will begin answering the question by saying, "That's a really great question!" I don't know why they do it (perhaps they're trying to disguise the fact that THEY were the one who wrote the question?), but it seems to happen the majority of the time. If the question is from an audience member, I almost never hear them utter those words.

So the next time you're listening to a webcast and you hear the presenter begin an answer with, "That's a really great question!", I'd be willing to bet it's a seed question the presenter wrote.

How the Facebook redesign will impact marketers

In the past couple weeks, Facebook users have been getting acquainted with the site's new look and feel. Personally I like it so far, although I must admit I haven't explored every shiny new detail yet. I've heard a lot of positive feedback, but plenty of users who aren't happy with the placement of this or that. I'm sure it'll just take users a couple months to become accustomed to it.

From an online marketing standpoint, there are a number of interesting things to examine with the Facebook redesign -- even if you're not advertising on Facebook:

• The new placement of ads in the right column. They used to be on the left, underneath the application toolbar. So now they've risen to a higher position on the page and switched sides.
  
  The move higher on the page is a no-brainer. But the jump from the left to the right is an interesting one to think about. Many web page eyetracking studies show that generally the left and center of a page will get more attention than the right side. Of course, Google AdWords are featured along the right side of its search results. I'm sure both Google and Facebook have done usability testing and eyetracking studies to determine the best place to put their ads, and the right side must be quite successful.
  
  I suppose you could look at it a couple of different ways. If the right column has become a de facto standard for displaying contextually relevant ads, then other companies who are designing sites might want to follow -- since users will become accustomed to seeing them in that spot. Or you could argue that it'd be good NOT to display ads along the right, because over time users could develop "contextual ad blindness," the younger brother of banner blindness.
  

• Facebook's contextual ads now have light gray thumbs up and thumbs down buttons below them, where users can offer feedback on the ad. If you click the thumbs down, it asks why and gives you a list of choices: misleading, pornographic, uninteresting, irrelevant, repetitive, or other. Whenever I clicked thumbs down and gave a reason, I never saw that ad again.
  
  It's great to see Facebook incorporating user feedback into its advertising. I don't know what Facebook will do with the information -- if it'll be available for advertiser review so they can craft better campaigns in the future. But that would be my expectation.
  
  This is something other contextual advertising sites should be doing (including Google) to improve relevance. For that matter, any website that delivers customized information to the user should have this feature. Amazon sticks out in my mind as a site that has been doing this for years with its suggestions.
  
  
• A side note about Facebook's contextual ads: I keep getting ads that seem to be geographically targeted to Connecticut or Rhode Island, even though I live in Ohio. I don't know why that would be the case, since I'm part of the Cleveland, Ohio network. I even double-checked my city in my user info, to make sure it's entered properly.
  
  I'm not sure if there's something broken with Facebook's geotargeting system, or if it's just an isolated incident. I'd think Facebook would be using the geography that users specify, rather than simple IP-based geotargeting. But even so, banners on other sites can figure out what city I live in based on my IP address, so why doesn't Facebook know where I live -- with even more information?
  
  
• Facebook's new tabbed design could have a major impact on marketers who have developed Facebook applications (for example, Radio Shack and its MyMosaic app). Because applications are now given a new tab, rather than being placed on a single long page, I wonder if many of them could become forgotten.
  
  By default, applications are being moved to the Boxes tab. Whether users will frequently make new tabs for applications, or if they'll keep most/all applications on the Boxes tab -- that remains to be seen.
  
  While it's a threat for application developers, it's also an opportunity. Now they'll have a lot more page width to work with. It's the digital equivalent to moving to a rural area from a big city. Everything's a lot less cluttered and there's plenty of space to spread out, rather than needing to work with a small chunk of real estate.
  
  The redesign could change the potential value of a Facebook app. Because of the tabbed structure and the possibility that apps will get less attention, they might have less value to marketers. But my bet is they'll increase in overall marketing importance in the coming year, as companies look for new ways to engage their loyal users and target audience.
  

SEO and SEM have become meaningless terms

This one makes me laugh every time I see it.

Every new website launch seems to come with the obligatory press release. And every site launch press release says something like, "To build traffic, we're optimizing the site for the search engines" or "We're doing a combination of SEM and SEO to promote our new site."

Of course you are. Or at least you should be. Why bother saying it anymore?

"Optimizing for search" and "SEO/SEM" have become such nebulous terms in press releases that it makes me wonder how many sites are actually putting forth a serious effort to maximize search engine exposure. It's almost like PR and marketing people have seen these phrases in every other site launch press release...thus they feel it's a necessary component for their press release. It's a safe thing to say you've done SEO/SEM -- because it's pretty much impossible for anyone to prove you haven't!

Included your site's top keywords in the title tag? Yep. Then I guess you're optimized for the search engines! ;-)