3 Ideas for Surviving Email Bankruptcy

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Justin Premick

Full Inbox After being out of the office for a particularly long weekend, I came back this morning, flipped on my computer and opened Thunderbird.

And boy, did the floodgates open. Internal messages from other AWeber team members, follow ups to conversations with live webinar attendees, web analytics reports… plus the usual complement of spam. All in all, some 1600+ email messages were vying for my attention.

So what do people do when they experience this?

Giving Up — Email Bankruptcy

I didn’t allow myself this option — to “give up,” tell everyone I wouldn’t be reading any recent email and that they’d have to resend anything important. But it’s not unheard-of, and your subscribers may do this from time to time.

For the record, RSS is no better than email in this regard — Google Reader greeted me with 672 unread items this morning, and I intend to mark about 650 of them as read without actually reading them.

In my discussion of this with Marc, the point came up that unlike email, with RSS you don’t expect anyone to be talking to you on a 1-to-1 basis — so we don’t hesitate to gloss over entire RSS feeds and folders because we’re not missing any personal messages.

In cases of chronically bloated inboxes, users often simply abandon an address entirely and open a new email account. I’m sure you’ve received such notifications from family and friends, and you’ve probably done it yourself at least once.

What Does This Mean To Email Marketers?

If subscribers take the first option — short-term email bankruptcy — it’s probably not the end of the world. If they do notify you (more likely if you’re in their address book), you could resend whatever message they missed. If they don’t notify you, they’ll just get your next message. No harm, no foul.

However, if they abandon the address and don’t tell you, two things happen:

Your open and click rates will fall because that subscriber will no longer be opening/reading your messages.
Your relationship with that subscriber will end — unless they resubscribe with their new address.

So basically, they’ve unsubscribed without you having done anything to drive them away. Not good. So what do you do?

Three Suggestions

Stay in contact with subscribers on a regular basis.
Put them in the habit of expecting to hear from you, so that after they change addresses, they note the void in their inboxes and can subscribe the new address.
Make it easy for them to subscribe the new address.
Provide subscribe instructions in your messages, so that if they read a message sent to their “old” address, they can easily get to your opt-in form. (This is also good for subscribers who forward your messages to other people!)
Provide relevant, valuable content — make subscribers want to keep receiving your messages, even if they declare email bankruptcy!

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Tags: relevance, strategy

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14 Responses

Carol Bentley
September 6th, 2007 at 4:00 pm

A very timely reminder of the email deluge we all face from time to time…

I spent last weekend trimming the number of email addresses that can now get through to me and some of the newsletters I would have quite like to have continued with were of no help; they didn’t remind me which email address I originally used to sign up (so I couldn’t update my details by going to their website) and others gave an unsubscribe, but not a re-subscribe as you suggest.

And now I have to confess… I don’t have a re-subscribe in my messages either. Think I’d better clean my act up before commenting on others… ;¬D
Rajeswer Naidu
September 6th, 2007 at 7:40 pm

It is true. It often happens to me. But I had never thought that the same could happen to my subscribers. A very timely reminder.

Thanks.
Rob Toth
September 6th, 2007 at 9:30 pm

1600 emails? Including spam? Ever since I started having my emails forwarded to Gmail, spam became a non-issue.

But great article. I really aim to have multiple mediums, ways of communicating with my audience vs. just email but this article makes recognize that I’m not doing all that I should be.

Right now, there’s probably more than a handful of subscribers who never really see my mailings yet would like to. That’s the online business version of shrinkage and I should get some more steps in place to cut back on this.

Thanks.
Marcel
September 7th, 2007 at 2:46 am

When coming back from short travels or holidays, the email flood really becomes unhandable. In order to keep subscribers on our lists in the instance they change their email address there only is one good solution only, that is providing useful quality content focused on their interests all the time, plus writing to them at least once a week (but probably not more often as well) so they remember you and miss something when it’s missing. In the end of the day however, I guess only one of a hundred would submit changed email address, whilst the other 99 would be lost for the life of our lists.
Marcel
September 7th, 2007 at 4:29 am

Hi Justin,
another thought or idea just came up to me. But this would mean for AWeber to pick that up and have it changed for all user accounts, as it is a general aweber setting.

At the very bottom of each and every email it reads:

"To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit:
htt p://www.aweber.com….xyz…"

If you could change that to somewhat slightly different mentioning they can also change their email address, I guess it would help to keep some more subscribers.

e.g. "To unsubscribe, update your email address or change subscriber options visit"…

May be a little to long for some footers, I know, but maybe the idea is not that bad…

What do you think?
Justin Premick
September 7th, 2007 at 9:05 am

27am,

Spam is a part of it, but a lot of it are other types of emails as well - subscribe & unsubscribe notifications, etc. And the messages are spread over a number of folders. But I agree - I use Gmail for my non-work email and it’s been very good to me.

Marcel,

In my personal opinion that is a bit much text for a footer, but perhaps there’s a better wording that could be used there. Definitely worth thinking about, thanks!
Jennifer Hofmann
September 10th, 2007 at 11:43 am

I was wondering if a similar dilemma is posed if someone clicked the "spam" button when they got something from me.

Does it stand to reason that my message would forever end up (unread) in their spam box?
Justin Premick
September 10th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

Jennifer,

Clicking the "Spam" button generates a complaint that is submitted to the user’s ISP and passed along to us. The person is unsubscribed and will not be sent any further messages.

As far as what happens with the message that was marked as spam, typically it’s moved immediately to the user’s Trash folder.
Bob Levy
September 11th, 2007 at 7:46 am

This was a daily headache until I came up with this solution.

1. Create a Folder called "InBox-Hold" (or some other name)
2. "Flag" the e-mails you want to keep and then move them to the "InBox-Hold" you just created
3. "Select all" other emails and delete them in bulk

Note: It is best to start with the last page and work backwards to the first page. If you start moving e-mails from the first page, then e-mails from the next page will move up the page you just worked on so this could be quite a task. Just work backwards and hope this helps.
Ambrose Duperon
September 13th, 2007 at 3:28 pm

Justin
Excellent article per usual. Will definitely have to add the subscribe link to my e-mails.
Ron Davies
September 13th, 2007 at 7:17 pm

Communication has been the key to success in business since long before the Internet was ever even conceived, and has been a problem, or at least a difficulty for equally as long.

Weak communication invariably yields greater subscriber loss rates from our membership sites, perhaps more so than any other single factor, including price increases, etc.

In our research, we found that solid and consistent communications via email to our membership would keep members with us in spite of almost any problem that was systemic.
Roz
September 21st, 2007 at 2:54 am

I just stopped by to have a look at aweber and wandered in on this conversation.

Excellent. I too NEVER put a

1) how to subscribe to the newsletter
2) resubscribe
3) how to change email address

I am not at the moment using aweber and perhaps is would be a good reason to, to have those options!

Thanks, I’ll be in touch.
» Why Do People Unsubscribe? An Audio Discussion - AWeber Blog
March 6th, 2008 at 11:34 am

[…] Sometimes email users decide to unsubscribe from many lists at once, and/or declare email bankruptcy. […]
Andres
April 5th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

Well,I’m so sick of SPAM that I developed a foolproof system to give everybody my email address, use my domain without even one email filter and still not receiving a single spam.

It requires a bit of work, but it works!
http://www.safecomputer.org/email-solution

I think email bankructy comes because people aren’t educated enough to stop spam. I have had my same email addresses for years, and never stopped reading any single email.