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How To Reduce Your Unsubscribe Rate Among New Customers

An unbalanced value exchange is like getting a rotten and beaten up pear when you’ve given up two ripe juicy apples. It sucks when you’re at the lousy end of the deal.

And that’s exactly how customers feel when they have given out their email addresses and then immediately afterwards are bombarded with emails encouraging them to buy again tomorrow. It’s just not a fair exchange—it is tipped in favor of the business.

It’s also how a customer feels when they’ve been told they’d find great deals at a shoe store but then once there they had to hunt for the deals. And if, during this scavenger hunt for deals, the store associates were uninformed or even rude, well you’ve got yourself one seriously bad value exchange going on. This is a broken customer experience.

Whenever there is a failed or bad value exchange there is surely a negative customer experience. A bad experience could mean I’m never coming back to your store. I’m just one lost customer, though. So why do you care?

Well if it was a really bad experience, I’ll probably tell all of my friends. There go more customers and potential customers.

Businesses do need to care about what customers are receiving on their end of the exchange. They need to balance the value exchange so that giving up an email address or some other piece of information pays off for the customer.

Picture that a set of scales is placed on a table between a customer and a business. The customer places his email address on the scale. To counterbalance, the business places some discount vouchers that require the customer to fill out a survey to be able to use them on the other side of the scale. The scale quivers as it adjusts itself to the offers being placed. There’s a problem. The scale ends up tipped upwards on the business’ side. This is especially true when the customer finds that same coupons are available to everyone.

Effectively, the customer has placed a greater offer in terms of value. Turn the offers into gold coins and you’ll see the scale weighs heavy on the customer’s (isn’t it the Biz side? Hmm.. I was thinking heavy on the customer side because they are giving up more coins/info for less coins/discount offers. We should put whatever makes the most sense intuitively) side. If that customer were me, I’d never enter into an exchange with that business again—in the future, I’m opting out.

Promising to send weekly coupons to a customer if he signs up for emails and then breaking that promise results in a very lost customer. He’ll ignore the email, unsubscribe from the email, or worse, he’ll tune out. When an email does come with an offer he would have responded to, he’s no longer paying attention. That is a lose-lose situation.

As a brand, a business, a store, you want to be friends with your customers. And therefore promises need to be kept and the sides of the scale equalized. Why do you want to be friends, you say?

Well, what you really want to do is sustain a positive relationship because you want your customer to come back. You want your customer to come back, be engaged, buy more and pricier products, and tell all his friends about how great your products are so that his friends become your customers. And so the story “grows” on.

The trick is getting to that level of friendship (read: engagement) with your customer that he will be driven to these actions.

Any interaction or customer engagement initiative needs to have an exchange of value. But there needs to be a value exchange beyond paying cash for products for a customer to remain engaged with a brand, a store, a business etc. There needs to be a reason, incentive, engagement, reward for a customer’s action to get the customer to come back.

Let’s say I’ve just bought a pair of shoes and have opted into communication with you by providing my email address (or my cell #, or I down load their app, or I provide them my mailing address, etc.). What will you do with it? What will be the value provided to me? As a business, that value should balance the value of me providing you my email address and be used in a strategic way to build a long-term relationship with me. Rather than sending me a discount on a bag I just bought at the full retail price (see the irony?), recognize that I’ve purchased a product with you. Thank me. Make me feel loved and appreciated and unique. Tell me more about you. Make sure I like my new purchase. And then maybe in a couple weeks I’ll be more receptive to a discount offer, a value-add special, or encouragement to buy.

Customers are real people and they want to feel like their favorite brands are treating them like real people; that their brands care about what they like. Create the feeling of there being a velvet rope and place them on the right side of it.

So it’s more complicated than just offering value for value. Proper values need to be assigned and must be balanced correctly. Value offers also need to be relevant. Don’t send me a discount voucher for maternity clothes if I’m not pregnant.

It needs to be the right value offer, balanced in the right way, to the right person, at the right time. Even create an imbalanced value exchange where the customer feels that they are getting the better side of the deal (if you have ever received a free desert at a restaurant when you did not feel you deserved it, you know the feeling!). Sometimes the right offer means tipping the scales in favor of the customer.

Right, how do we do this? Stayed tuned for our next blog post!

Written by: Marion Haltermeyer