No Unsubscribes? No Problem. Or Is it?

How do you measure success in your email marketing campaign for your vacation rental website? Do you measure it with your unsubscribe rate? If you do, you may not be as successful as you think you are. In fact, you may be wasting time writing messages that your renters aren’t reading!

Email marketing is a great way to keep the conversation slowing with your list of contacts. You can offer something useful to encourage people to sign up, just like @craigmcginty does.

I was talking to a friend with a vacation home the other day. She said that she thought her email newsletters were doing well because she doesn’t get many unsubscribers (in other words, people opting-out from her email list).

I thought that was an interesting point of view.

Maybe you’ve been in this situation too. If your readers aren’t opting out from your list, you must be doing well, right? I’m not so sure…

Does this really mean that the people on your email list like your stuff? Does it mean that they are reading it? Enough to keep in contact with you and maybe book your place again?

Maybe they ignore your messages and don’t have the motivation to unsubscribe

You probably subscribe to a few lists yourself. You know the ones - they fill up your inbox and you may get around to reading them once in a while. You might even decide sometimes to clear things out a bit and to unsubscribe from a few of the lists. Do you ever get around to this? Or, are you buried in email?

This is probably a familiar story for many of your contacts.

Here are a few things to think about:

• Is it easy to unsubscribe?
• Are your message titles interesting enough for people to open them?
• Are your messages interesting enough for people to look forward to them and open them?

So let’s talk about some better ways to measure your list. You should definitely find a way to measure it - otherwise how do you know if it’s working?

Most email marketing systems (e.g. AWeber, profollow, constant contact) allow you to measure your delivery rate. How many times have your messages been delivered? This is a good first step.

It’s even better if you can measure the open rate. Which messages are being opened (and therefore read) by your contacts? Which ones have a low open rate? Why don’t people open them? Maybe the titles don’t look interesting or relevant to the group of people who signed up to your list. Can you improve these?

It’s even better than this if you’re measuring a conversion event, such as clicking on a link, or signups to another list, or even bookings (in other words, sales!) This allows you to measure whether subscribers are actually reading your messages all the way through to your links.

Should you measure your unsubscribe rate? Certainly. If it starts to go up then this means you may not be providing something valuable for your readers. Maybe you’re sending out too many messages. You should check to see if readers are unsubscribing after a certain message in your queue. If this message causes problems, take a good look at it and think about why you might be losing readers at this point.

Just make sure that the unsubscribe rate isn’t the only metric that you use.