You send an email you’ve spent an hour on. You get three unsubscribes. And your stomach drops a bit.
I know. It stings every time, and anyone who tells you it doesn’t is fibbing.
But those three people were never going to buy anything from you.
Somebody unsubscribing means they’ve decided this isn’t for them. Maybe they signed up for one freebie two years ago and forgot. Maybe their business has changed. Maybe they’ve stopped trading. Maybe they just don’t like being emailed, which is fair enough. Whatever the reason, they’ve taken themselves off a list they weren’t reading, and now you’re not sending emails to somebody who was never going to open one.
Most email software charges you by how many people are on your list. So you’re paying, every month, to keep sending things to people who aren’t interested. And a list full of people who never open anything makes your open rate look worse than it is, which makes it harder to tell what’s actually working.
What you want to look at is how many of them read what you send, and how many buy something.
So when you get unsubscribes, look at what else happened. Did anyone reply? Did anyone click? Did anybody buy? That’ll tell you far more than the three that left.
The one time I would sit up and take notice is if a lot of people go at once, or if it happens every time you send a particular sort of email. That’s worth a look, because it might be that you emailed people who’d gone cold months ago, or that something you sent didn’t go down the way you expected.
Otherwise, let them go. You want the people who want to be there.