Social Networks Crippled By Unsubscribes
- by Jess Nelson , February 19, 2016
Social networks rank among the most unsubscribed email lists, according to new research revealed Wednesday by Unroll.me.
Unroll.me, a Web-based and mobile application that allows consumers to unroll from any email list they have subscribed to, analyzed the unsubscribe behavior of millions of its users to determine the winners and losers of this year's Spammy Awards -- and which companies are losing the highest audience to unsubscribes.
StumpleUpon has the highest rate of unsubscribes, according to the study, with 43% of consumers opting out of receiving future email updates. Live Nation and Good Reads followed with a 38% and 35% unsubscribe rate, respectively.
Foursquare, Twitter and classmates.com also ranked in the top ten unsubscribed subscriptions.
JoJo Hedaya, cofunder of Unroll.me, explained in a conversation with MediaPost why social media networks rank among the most unsubscribed email lists.
“Social media networks send a large amount of emails, with many holding content surrounding software updates/changes,” says Hedaya. “Their users receive much of this information via their smartphone alerts and through app updates, so in their eyes, the actual emails may feel redundant.”
Promotion code and coupon companies Groupon and Living Social send the most emails per person of any other company, according to Unroll.me’s study. Groupon sends an average of 388 emails per subscriber, while Living Social follows with an average of 363 emails sent per subscriber.
Facebook sent the third-highest volume of email per subscriber, with an average of 310 emails sent according to Unroll.me.
Hedaya says there is no precise recipe for avoiding unsubscribes because many different factors may be involved with the process, but the key to determining the best course of action is located in email analytics.
“The recommendation I would give to email marketers is that they need to gain an understanding of what their users want, which can be best understood by analyzing the data,” says Hedaya. “It may be a combination of things -- too many emails, not enough emails, or having content not interesting or enticing enough. When a higher frequency of emails is sent, do users open and read them? If marketers dissect the data, they can easily see what is causing people to unsubscribe.”
Unroll.me claims to have stopped 4.6 billion emails through its service, and unsubscribed people from 423,234,234 email subscriptions over the past three years.
My concern with this story is that it can and impact small business whom are trying to promote their services locally. Small business are only try to pitch once a month promotions by hosting a local event, in which will help grow their return of their investment =ROI. Sure other companies such as FB, Google, Apple, etc.. are competing for their fair share of business or take business, yet small entity it can ane may hurt their bottom line.
This article fails to support it's thesis, that social networks are "crippled" by unsubscribes. It contains data on the high rates of unsubscribes seen by social networks but nothing about how this is crippling to their business objectives. How are the social networks being hurt by the high rate of unsubscribes? The author even included a quote from Jojo Hedaya that asserts the opposite of Nelson's assertions, that social network users are receiving enough information through other channels that their emails may feel redundant to subscribers. This hardly sounds crippling. Consider being more accurate and less sensational.
StumpleUpon (?)
has the highest rate of unsubscribes, according to the study, with 43% of consumers opting out of receiving future email updates.