No one wants to feel overwhelmed with irrelevant emails or spam messages. That’s why it is extremely important to give your email subscribers control over their email subscriptions. By doing so, you not only give them control over their email inbox but also establish yourself as an ethical marketer. Additionally, it brings numerous benefits, such as enhancing your email marketing efforts and the performance of your email campaigns.
In this guide, we’ll discuss what email subscription management is and how you can manage email subscription settings effectively.
What is an email subscription?
An email subscription is a process that allows individuals to sign up to receive regular emails from a company, organization, or individual. These incoming messages or emails can include newsletters, updates, promotional offers, or other content relevant to the subscriber's interests.
How does an email subscription work?
Email subscription allows individuals to get email communications by choosing to opt in. Here’s how an email subscription works:
People who want to subscribe to emails fill out a subscription form or an opt-in form usually found on a website, where they provide their email address and details such as names and other preferences.
Once they submit the form, they receive an email confirmation.
In case of double opt-ins, the recipient has to click on the confirmation link to confirm their subscription and receive the welcome email. In other cases, the recipient directly receives the welcome email after submitting the form.
Email addresses of users who submitted their email addresses and clicked on the confirmation link are added to the email list.
Now, the sender can send emails to these subscribers. Subscribers who don’t want to receive emails can opt-out anytime by clicking on the unsubscribe link present in the emails.
You can read more about email subscriptions and how to set one up on Mailmodo in our related guide below:
What do you mean by email subscription management?
Email subscription management refers to the process of organizing and maintaining your email list to ensure effective communication with your subscribers. It includes managing how people join your email list, handling their content preferences, and segmenting them into different groups while respecting their privacy.
Why is email subscription management important?
As an email sender, it is important to manage your email subscriptions to keep your audience engaged and nurture a healthy relationship with them. This not only helps you to ensure your emails reach relevant people but also ensures compliance with anti-spam regulations, protecting your brand reputation. Email subscription management aims to offer a better experience to your email subscribers from the moment they sign up.
When recipients receive emails that align with their preferences and interests, they’re more likely to open and engage with them, leading to higher open rates. This also reduces unsubscribe rates by enabling subscribers to manage their subscription preferences.
At the same time, poor subscription management can bring a negative impact, resulting in loss of subscribers and engagement, harming the senders reputation and sometimes resulting in legal issues.
How to manage email subscriptions
Now that you know how email subscription management affects your email deliverability and overall email campaign performance, here are some best practices to help you manage email subscriptions better.
1. Use suppression list
A suppression list includes email addresses of subscribers who have marked your email as spam or have opted out from your email list. You can move disengaged users, including those who have opted out or marked your emails as spam, into a separate list and stop sending them emails. This allows you to focus on your engaged subscribers and safeguards your sender reputation.
2. Implement a sunset policy
A sunset policy defines the rules to identify disengaged or inactive subscribers and remove them from your mailing list to ensure you don’t send them emails in the future.
To implement a sunset policy, start by monitoring your subscribers' actions and segmenting your list on engagement levels. Find out how many people open and engage with your emails, how many open but don’t engage with your emails, and how many don’t open your emails at all.
Carry out re-engagement campaigns to encourage people to engage with your emails; however, if they don't engage, remove them from your list.
3. Include an unsubscribe button
Always include an unsubscribe option in the header and at the bottom of your emails to allow subscribers to cancel their email subscriptions when they no longer want to receive your emails. If you don’t provide them the freedom to unsubscribe, they might mark your emails as spam, impacting your email deliverability and sender reputation.
Including an unsubscribe option also helps you to stay in compliance with anti-spam regulations, get feedback, and prevent subscriber frustration.
Bottom line, make it easy for subscribers to opt-out with a single click and process the unsubscribe request in 2 days.
4. Set up and manage preference centers
An email preference center is a page that helps subscribers to manage their email preferences, such as the frequency, content, and kind of emails they receive. It also gives subscribers the option to opt out of receiving specific emails, and get more relevant emails in their inboxes.
If you want to set up a preference center, you must classify emails into different categories, such as new updates, promotional emails, and newsletters. Next, you need to specify the frequency of emails aligned with the preferences of your recipients ensuring you’re sending relevant emails and at the right intervals.
You can also use surveys to ask your subscribers about their interests and preferences or use analytics to find out how subscribers interact with your emails.
5. Create engagement segments
Segmenting your email list based on subscriber engagement levels helps you to keep your engagement levels and your deliverability metrics high. By using it effectively, you'll be able to maintain good performance of your email campaigns and even re-engage lost subscribers. For example, you can create engagement segments as follows:
Active contacts: All contacts in your contact list who have opened at least one email in the last 30 days.
High openers: Contacts who have opened more than 25% of the emails sent to them in the last 30 days.
Action takers: Contacts who have clicked on links or submitted forms more than 10% in the last 30 days.
You can schedule 1-2 emails per week (offers and promotions) to reach your active subscribers first. Next, you can send re-engagement emails to your dormant or inactive subscribers who have stopped interacting with your emails over time.
Conclusion
Now you know how important it is to manage email subscriptions to ensure successful email marketing campaigns.Implement the strategies discussed above to manage email subscriptions effortlessly. Make sure you clean your email list and send targeted, personalized and relevant content to your subscribers. Respect the preferences of your subscribers and and offer them unsubscribe service if they want to do so. This will help you maintain a healthy relationship with your audience and offer them an exceptional email experience.
