The Dark Side of Email Marketing: Minimizing Unsubscribes & Complaints at Scale - EP 46

Minimizing unsubscribes and complaints is getting frequency and timing right, because this is often the biggest driver of negative subscriber reaction. Frequency is such a critical factor because it's the number one reason people unsubscribe. Yet most brands are afraid to send too much without realizing, or they're afraid to send too little. They tend to undercommunicate and become forgettable.

As you need this kind of feedback loop that's going to allow you to have continued feedback so you can make sure each email, each segment, each content bucket is really relevant to each person. Do things like monitor unsubscribes, reasons and feedback that kind of lend to the type of content you should be sending. Track kind of which content drives the highest engagement and which one drives the highest unsub. And you want to send out and implement subscriber surveys so you can help understand if you're on the mark or not.

Yo, Chase, what's up, dude?

Hey, man, how are you?

I'm good, man. I'm looking at the clock and one, realizing summer is just about over.

It's crazy. Didn't that fly by?

I don't know. I feel like when we were kids, it took forever. And of course, it kind of flew by. But as we're adults now, like, it's just another season, I guess. It's a little bit warmer.

Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah.

So anyways, we've got a cool pod lined up here today. We're going to talk about the dark side of email marketing. And we're going to be talking about unsubscribes and complaints at scale. I think this is a topic that people don't talk enough about. And it's probably something that people are curious about. So If you're ready to shoot this thing, you, uh, let's do it in 3, 2, 1. From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. What is up everyone? Welcome back to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing in e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host, Chase Diamond. All right. As I kind of shared episode 46, the dark side of email marketing, minimizing unsubscribes and complaints at scale. And today we're diving into a dark side of email marketing, the metrics that most brands don't want to talk about, But absolutely need to understand, and especially if you're a retention marketer, these are things that you probably don't look enough at, which is the unsubscribe and the complaints. While everyone celebrates their open rates or click-through rates or revenue, the whole other side of email marketing performance is that you can make— it can make or break your program and it's your sender reputation ultimately.

Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, we see brands all the time who are focused on, you know, vanity metrics. While their unsubscribe rates are climbing and their complaint rates are destroying their deliverability behind the scenes without them obviously even knowing.

And here's the thing, as you scale your email marketing, these dark side metrics become even more critical because the small percentages translate to thousands of unhappy subscribers or subscribers who literally aren't getting your email ultimately, which means that you've got serious damage to your sender reputation. So we're going to break down what metrics really mean, why it's crucial for your long-term success. We're going to share some industry benchmarks so you And we're going to really break it down. And I think we came up with 5 different strategies for minimizing unsubscribes and complaints at scale. So listen, if you've been ignoring these metrics or don't know what a good performance looks like, this episode will change how you think about email marketing success. So you ready to jump right in?

Yeah, let's run it.

All right, cool. Well, let's jump right into our first strategy. So our first strategy for minimizing unsubscribes and complaints is getting frequency and timing right. Because this is often the biggest driver of negative subscriber reaction. Frequency is such a critical factor because it's the number one reason people unsubscribe. Yet most brands are afraid to send too much without realizing, or they're afraid to send too little because they want to uncommunicate. They tend to undercommunicate and become forgettable. And what makes this a challenge is that the optimal frequency varies dramatically by industry, customer type, or even individual subscriber and their behavior patterns. You know, I get asked a lot of people are always like, hey, how many How many times a week should I email? And the honest answer is, and the answer that everyone hates is, it depends ultimately. But what I've ultimately come up with, there are 3 different things that I think about when I'm thinking about the framework around the frequency and the timing optimization that it comes down to. Number one, it's a little data-driven. You're going to analyze your stuff. You're going to track your unsubscribes. You're going to segment. You're going to segment your subscribers by different engagement levels. And then you're going to sit there and monitor those complaints. Complaint rates and analyze those lifetime values by frequency. So I start with the data, then I go into more or less the preference center. I think this is something that's underutilized by many brands in the market, but you've got to implement a preference center these days because you really just don't know what the frequency that people like. You got to offer different types, daily, weekly, monthly, and even create special VIP segments for customers who want more frequent communication because there are people who really want to know what your brand is up to. And this provides You know, something that's easy for a user to adjust before they unsubscribe. And that's really the key to that. And the third thing that I came up with really is strategy. When you think about the strategy of send time optimization, you really need to analyze the engagement and the patterns. Avoid sending during high stress periods or oversaturation windows. I think about implementing some type of send time personalization based on individual history. And some ESPs offer some variant of that, though it'll be local timing or whatever it might be. And of course, monitor and adjust for seasonality. I mean, one thing that I can tell you right now is school started, right? And if school starts, the seasonality just changed on what people are checking their emails. They're not getting up in the summer anymore and, you know, getting on their email right away. They've got life to hit them. And so a lot of these things matter.

Right.

And so does the lifecycle stage of timing and so forth.

Yeah, well said. I'd say, I'd say like what's crucial to understand is that frequency tolerance isn't just about how many emails you send. You know, it's more about like the value kind of to noise ratio in each email itself.

No, that's very well said. And subscribers will tolerate more frequent emails if each one provides genuine value. But the reality is they'll unsubscribe just as quickly from infrequent emails that feel irrelevant or purely promotional. I mean, there's goodwill that comes into this place and, you know, we, I looked at some industry data. And it shows that e-commerce brands average 4 to 6 emails per month. And that's kind of crazy. And they see an average unsubscribe rate between 0.2 to 0.5%, but those varies behind those customer engagements. And the reality, it goes like this, right? And I kind of broke down more data and went and dug around. And the reality is engagement-based frequency segmentation, you'll have kind of like 3, 4 buckets basically. Those 3, 4 buckets look like this. You got the highly engaged people, they open 80% of emails, they like daily communication. Then you got like that moderately engaged, which is opening 40 to 80%. And that means you're probably sending them 2, 3 emails a week. Then you've got that low engagement, right? The people are under 40%. That's probably a weekly or biweekly. And then last bucket you think about is kind of that re-engagement segment, which is really the people who are not really opening very much, very low number. And that drives me to what I call the value density strategy, which is you've got to combine this multiple pieces of strategy. And put multiple pieces of valuable content into fewer, richer emails, right? Longer length, right? This is something that I'm seeing more of in this market. And it's just because, look, when you can get their attention, you want to be in front of them and you want to give easy-to-digest formats to deliver more value per send. And that focus starts with either education or entertainment rather than purely promotional. I think this is a misstep that many brands are having. And it includes, you know, exclusive offers, insider offers, whatever it might be to justify that frequency that you do. You know, one brand we're working with, they reduced their unsubscribe by 45% by moving from daily promotional emails to about 3 times of value-packed emails and their revenue stayed about the same.

Yeah, dude. I think that's a great example of how quality kind of trumps quantity. You know, they're actually providing more value per week while sending fewer emails. That's the holy grail.

And I'll leave it at this as we move on to the next one, but the key insight is that subscribers don't count emails. In fact, they're flooded Flooded with emails. They only notice when they feel overwhelmed or the content stops being relevant to their interests, needs, and wants ultimately.

Yeah, 100%. You know, we recommend auditing your current frequency against your unsubscribe spikes to identify that kind of equilibrium and that brand tolerance threshold before kind of optimizing. So now on the second strategy, you know, it's gonna focus on improving content relevance through, you know, better and smarter segmentation because irrelevant content is the second biggest driver of unsubscribes right after the frequency issues. So in terms of content relevance, this is critical and crucial because subscribers gave you permission to email them based on expectations they had about what they're gonna receive. So when you consistently send irrelevant content, you're breaking and violating that trust. And as your subscriber list grows, you know, the diversity of interests and preferences increases. Making kind of this broad brush content approach less effective and really more likely to increase your unsubscribe rate. So in terms of like this kind of content relevance and segmentation framework, I wanna talk about 3 things. So the first hinges around behavioral and preference-based content targeting. So with this, you're gonna wanna segment based off product category interests and purchase history, right? Really rich data that you have available. And then you're gonna wanna create these content paths based on engagement patterns and each individual subscriber's preferences. And with this, you're gonna be able to develop lifecycle-appropriate content for each different customer stage, whether they're, you know, brand new to you or they're a VIP kind of repeat loyal customer. And you're gonna wanna use each person's browsing behavior to inform kind of the content relevance and product focuses. You know, what do you send them and what should it be about? And then the next component here is leveraging dynamic content personalization. So that way you're being relevant at scale. So you wanna implement this kind of dynamic product recs based on each individual customer's behavior or subscriber's behavior. And you're gonna wanna create kind of modular blocks that's gonna show different info to different segments. And then, right, when you're doing all of this, right, you're gonna wanna personalize subject lines, preview text, et cetera. Based on this segment characteristic. And then the last thing here is you need this kind of feedback loop that's gonna allow you to have continue feedback so you can make sure each email, each segment, each content bucket is really relevant to each person. So you wanna do things like monitor unsubscribe reasons and feedback that kind of lend to the type of content you should be sending. You wanna track kind of which content drives the highest engagement. And which one drives the highest unsubscribes. And you wanna send out and implement subscriber surveys so you can help understand if you're on the mark or not. And then lastly, running kind of reply type campaigns to gather direct feedback and open up the dialogue is really great so that way you can make sure you're on the right track. And what makes all of this content relevance really challenging at scale is trying to balance this personalization with also making sure that you're Operationally kind of efficient.

Yeah. You nail it right there. Look, you need systems that can deliver personalized relevant content to thousands of subscribers without requiring individual attention for each and every email.

Hey there. It's Chase. Just quick 15 seconds of your time because I have something really fun to share. Did you know that between myself and Jimmy, we have over 20 years of experience in email marketing specifically? And recently, we put our minds together and created a certification program that takes all of our knowledge to share with you. It's called Ecom Email Certified. It's an end-to-end course and certification program that's designed to take anyone, regardless of whether you're a newbie or an experienced marketer, founder, executive, agency marketer, etc., and really teaches them everything we know about email and SMS marketing. And it really covers the full A through Z, everything from deliverability, AI, copywriting, design, strategy, you name it, we cover it. And it's loaded with over 175 modules. Yes, that's correct. We have 175+ modules and counting, and it's 25+ hours of education combined with quizzes and a community all designed to educate, test, and certify you or your team members to be a full-fledged email marketer for e-commerce. And since you're listening to this pod, We really wanna hook you up for your loyalty and hook you up with a $200 off coupon code of the certification. Jump over to ecomemailcertified.com. You'll find the code over there. And with that, we're now back to the pod. Yeah, and what's super interesting is that studies show that ecom brands using kind of this more behavioral type segmentation for their content relevance, they're seeing 60% lower unsub rates and 75% fewer spam complaints compared to just general content approaches. So it really is effective. And it really is gonna allow you to save unsub, you know, and really optimize for really strong email deliverability. So in terms of like these relevance kind of optimization tactics, one way to do this is via kind of product affinity-based content streams. So what you're gonna wanna do is you wanna create, you know, separate email tracks for different product categories or interests, and then you're gonna develop content calendars that are gonna align with these seasonal purchase patterns. And then you wanna use, you know, people's purchase history to predict and kind of serve relevant content types. And then lastly, you know, since you have all of this, you're gonna wanna implement really smart, unique cross-sell and upsell content that feels helpful rather than kind of pushy and salesy. And then the second is focusing on engagement level, kind of appropriate messaging. So here you're gonna wanna send detailed educational content. To your most and kind of highly engaged subs. And then you're gonna wanna provide a kind of a lighter weight and more visual type content to your more casual browsers. And then you also wanna not ignore your VIPs. So for them, you're gonna create exclusive insider content. And then lastly, you need to develop strategies to be able to reengage those folks that are potentially churning or kind of having declining engagement. So one of the best tactics that we've seen is creating these kind of content personas based on the subscriber behavior rather than just kind of their demographics.

Ah, I like that. That's really smart because ultimately you're focused on what customers actually rather do than assumptions of what you might want them based on their age or location ultimately, right?

Yeah, that's right. And like a real tangible example, so a beauty brand that we work with, They segment based off kind of skincare-focused, makeup-focused, or multi-category-based. And this is all done based off someone's browsing and purchase behavior. And we've seen around about 40% lower unsubscribe rate as a result. So the key, you know, with all of this is making segmentation feel really natural and helpful rather than creepy or kind of overly targeted. So start with like 3 to 5 kind of clear behavioral segments. And gradually add complexity as you gather more data. And that way you can optimize the performance.

Now, I love it. It sounds like that's exactly spot on, and I agree with everything you just kind of said. So let's move on. Let's go to our 3rd strategy, which involves better expectation management and subscriber onboarding. This is very key because many unsubscribes happen when reality doesn't match the subscriber's expectedness when they sign up, right? This is one of the most underrated factors in unsubscribe prevention ultimately. Most brands focus on trying to win back customers after they've basically made them unhappy. And rather than setting those proper expectations upfront, and this is truthful for any business, not just e-commerce ultimately, setting those clear expectations and setting them during the opt-in process and a strong welcome series can prevent many unsubscribes before they happen by ensuring subscribers know exactly what you're getting into ultimately. And to me, when I think about like, what does it mean to be really clear? And I know that's the thought process people have. I kind of boiled it down to a couple of things. So number one, a transparent opt-in process and clear value propositions. I mean, you know, if you think about it, for years marketers are just trying to get that email. And look, we all want to get that email. We want that information. But having a clear communication around the frequency and the content types during that signup is going to set an expectation about like what promotional and what education I'm going to get and even exclusive benefits and values, why they're sitting there and a subscriber to your newsletter ultimately or your brand or business ultimately. Then I would layer that on with a great comprehensive welcome series education, right? And what I'm talking about is like, A, you know, I love double opt-in. I think that is probably the future and having that is probably one way to think about it. It's an option, of course. You don't have to do it. People are scared about it. But what I do care about is providing clear instructions for how to manage their preference. When we talked about the preference center, this is where you're like, hey, we send emails, blah, blah, blah. And by the way, if you want to change that and slow it down or speed it up, we have options to do that. You also want to continue to introduce the brand story and what the whole value of being on that email list is. Not really around like, you know, not really around like, oh, we're going to send you promotional stuff, but like, What other valuable education, information, things that you can do? And if you just send promos only, well, that's a little bit harder, of course. And make sure that they have great experiences. And then, of course, I think the last thing, a thing that we are all terrible at doing, is ongoing communication about changes and updates to different things that are happening with the frequency or even the content that you're doing. Like, just be upfront with people. Remember, there's humans on the other end of this thing and they really want the reasoning and—

Yeah.

Explanation behind why things are changing and give people an option to adjust preferences before unsubscribing. Again, at least to have them is better than to lose them completely ultimately. And that all comes from maintaining transparency about what you're doing ultimately.

Yeah. And what's powerful about proper kind of expectation management is that it attracts the right subs while deterring those who aren't a good fit for your program.

No, that's exactly right. And it's better to have a few subscribers who are genuinely interested than a large list of people who just don't give a crap ultimately, and they'll unsubscribe and complain. In fact, when I was looking this up, I was like, is there data around this? And what I found was that brands with a comprehensive onboarding and expectation management, they see a 55% lower unsubscribe rate in the first 90 days and 40% fewer spam complaints, which is a pretty big lift ultimately. And I know what you're thinking right now. You're probably like, hey, You know, what is the way you'd even implement this thing? Well, here's some of the ideas that I came up with when I was kind of preparing for the show ultimately. So A, I think about a value-focused opt-in copy and message. It's a little bit less around join our newsletter, but it's more about like, here's our weekly insider tips, get the latest about this industry, get tips about your dog training, whatever it might be. Give them more reason besides a coupon ultimately.

Yes.

And you should even include the frequency and say, hey, we send emails 3 times a week with exclusive deals and style tips. Like, it's not that hard to say that. It's a small blurb, but you'll be crazy how people are— they want to be set with expectations upfront, right? Oh, educational value, exclusive offers, early access to sales, whatever it might be. And then of course, make sure there's a clear unsubscribe link, right? And but I think again, this is an opportunity to say, You don't have to unsubscribe. You can just set the different preferences. So for me, if I like take that and I'm saying, hey, what does that welcome series look like? I kind of came up with like a 4-step formula, which is email 1 is just a confirmation, what you're going to get, how to preference, basically getting them understanding and giving them what you're going to tell them you're going to give them. If it was a coupon, give them the coupon. If it was an educational thing, give them the educational. Then email 2— Email 2. Is like the value explanation, the brand story, the instructions, the education, why you started it. Give the subscribers some value. Then you might go into email 3 and give them an example of what you're going to be sending. If it's more promotional, get to the promotional here. This is important. You want to promote and tell people this is what you do, because what you're doing is you're setting the cadence in front of them. And an email 4 would be maybe an introduction to maybe the preference center or how to customize or Continuing to promote, but also giving them more options. And the last thing I'll kind of end this thing with is, you know, we recommend including a what to expect section in your welcome emails with actual examples of subject lines and content type. I know that sounds crazy, but the reality is people just want to know ultimately.

Yeah, I think that's brilliant because it removes any type of mystery about your email program, right? And helps subscribers really mentally prepare for what's to come.

Yeah. I mean, it's humans behind a screen just like you and I, and we subscribe to brands just as much. And the more we know, the better we feel because it feels like we're doing it together ultimately. And, you know, one of the clients that we have, a home goods brand we work with, they include a calendar showing their typical schedule of emails. And that ultimately helped them by saying, hey, we're going to email you Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And people knew exactly what they're going to get and their unsubscribe rate Reduced by like 35% ultimately. And the key to all of this, what I learned from all of this when I was kind of doing my deeper research and preparing for the show, is that proactively transparent rather than hoping subscribers will figure out your email program on their own because they almost know when to expect it. And making it easy for subscribers to adjust their preferences before they reach out to the point where you lose them, AKA unsubscribe completely.

Yeah. And our 4th strategy focuses on proactive list hygiene and engagement-based subscriber management to remove potential complainers before they become a problem.

Yeah, dude, let's be honest. List hygiene is crucial because it's the disengaged subscribers as much as— is much more likely to hurt you than unsubscribers, right? Mark as spam, complain to ISPs, all which hurt your sender Hey, it's Jimmy, and I hope you're enjoying the pod so far. I want to talk to you about one of our sponsors, and it's about sales tax. Yeah, I know nobody wants to hear about it, but here's the thing. You're selling online. You've probably spent way too much time, money, and stress on something that should be automated. Enter Kintsugi, pronounced Kintsugi, named after Japanese art of turning broken pottery into something beautiful and resilient. That's exactly what Kintsugi does for you. Sugi does for your tax chaos. Their AI monitors and files and optimizes your sales tax automatically across all states and jurisdictions. They even go to Canada and even to Europe as well. We're talking about saving you serious time. The average customer spends 9 hours every single month working on this. That's over 100 hours a year that you get back to focus on your actual growing business. But here's where it gets really good. No more expensive tax professionals eating into your profits. Kintsugi AI handles compliance with a 98.3% reduction in error. That's practically bulletproof accuracy. One-click integrations with your existing platforms and systems, meaning that the setup is painless, and their white glove support team has your back every step of the way. Sales tax headaches? Gone forever. Consider them eliminated forever. And it's e-commerce, SaaS, and agency— anyone who pays sales tax And we have a very special offer for you today. If you mention Jimmy and Chase, you get 3 months completely free. That's 3 months of automated tax filings, perfect compliance, and getting your life back. Visit trykintsugi.com and mention Jimmy and Chase for a 3-month head start.

Yeah. And as your list grows, the percentage of disengaged subs typically increases unless you have a systematic process for identifying and managing kind of these low engagement segments. So with that, here are 3 ways to think about kind of how to manage your list hygiene and kind of engagement management. So number one is systematic engagement tracking and subscriber scoring. So with this, you're gonna wanna monitor engagement patterns over time to identify which of the subs on the list are having declining kind of engagement. And then you're gonna wanna create kind of engagement scores based off of, you know, opens, clicks, and other kind of interaction metrics. So you can score them. And then with that, you're gonna wanna track kind of subscriber lifecycle stages and engagement evolution patterns. You know, what does that look like? This way is gonna allow you to identify subs who are at risk of becoming complainers before they disengage and kind of check out completely. And then the second step of this is this proactive re-engagement and win-back campaigns. So you're gonna wanna design targeted campaigns for these declining engagement segments. You know, offering things like preference adjustments and frequency changes before they unsubscribe entirely. And then with this, you wanna create kind of these more complex, kind of sophisticated win-back content that's gonna reignite the interest and bring 'em back into, you know, a good bucket and a good category of subs. And then if that doesn't work, you just provide, you know, easy exit paths for subs who can't be re-engaged because Inherently, there's gonna be a group of those people. And then lastly, you wanna be really strategic about kind of your list pruning and kind of sunset policies. So you wanna implement sunset policies for consistently disengaged or unengaged subs, you know, removing subscribers along the way who show kind of spam complaint risk patterns because that's dangerous. And then maintaining separate suppression lists for different types of disengagement and focusing on the balance of kind of your list goal. Obviously, you're right, you wanna have a great No, this is 100% spot on.

As someone who's built an ESP, dealt with deliverability and all this stuff that's happened, what makes list hygiene particularly important, especially at scale, is that even a small percentage of problematic subscribers can trigger a major issue for you at the deliverability. When you have 100,000 subscribers, even a small 1% complaint rate means 1,000 people potentially marking your emails as spam, which ISPs definitely don't want to see.

Yeah.

So it's really important to make sure that you're taking care of your list. Definitely notice.

Yeah. And interestingly enough, kind of industry benchmarks show that e-com brands should maintain engagement rates above 20% over 90 days with complaint rates below, you know, 0.1% to ensure that they have this strong kind of good deliverability. And there's kind of 2 ways to kind of create this engagement management tactic. So number one is leveraging kind of automated engagement scoring and segmentation. So with this, you're gonna so kind of score your subs based off recency and frequency of engagement. And then with that, you wanna create kind of automated campaigns for different levels of engagement. And you're gonna wanna set up alerts for subs who are showing rapid engagement decline because they exist. You probably just don't know it cuz you're not tracking it. And then you want to kind of implement progressive engagement requirements for different types of content. And then the second part of this, the other side of this is kind of having the strategic sunset sequence implementation. So let's kind of talk about 3, kind of like anywhere from like 1 to 3 months. So at the 30-day, right? So at 1 month, you might wanna do things like a 30-day re-engagement campaign for subscribers who have declining activity. At the 60-day mark, you're gonna implement things like final chance campaigns with strong incentives and content. And at the 90-day mark, right, you know, you've been trying, you've been trying, you're just gonna wanna have removal from active lists with suppression list addition. And then you have like the option to rejoin with fresh expectations and preference setting. So, you know, one of the most kind of effective tactics we've seen in the, you know, we miss you type campaign is it offers subscribers multiple options before unsubscribing.

That's perfectly spot on and smart because it gives subscribers control and often reveals if they just want fewer emails rather than no emails at all.

Yeah, and a fashion company that we work with, they implemented something along these lines, like this approach that we're talking about, and they converted about 30% of potential unsubscribes into just lower frequency sends. So think about that, almost a third of your list is saved because they just wanna receive emails less frequently. And the key is making kind of list hygiene feel like customer service rather than kind of really aggressive, you know, in your face. retention tactics. And with this, you wanna track kind of long-term impact on deliverability and sender reputation, not just the immediate list size returns.

That makes total sense. I think that's spot on. A lot of the thoughts you have when you think about what it really means when you are really focused on giving people the control to basically tell you and give you that feedback loop ultimately. It leads us to our 5th and final strategy, and this one focuses on Spam complaints and protecting your deliverability reputation, which is crucial for long-term, right? Look, spam complaints are weird, all right? And I've talked about this on this pod a couple times. So spam complaints are often more damaging than unsubscribes because they're directly signals to your ISPs, uh, that your subscriber doesn't want the email. And if you're on Yahoo or AOL or any of these other ones, that information comes back. But of course, with Gmail, for example, they're not even telling you the information unless you log into your Google Postmaster Tools. So again, as we always say, if you don't have Google Postmaster Tools and you listen to this pod, you should probably pause right now and go install that real quick. It's free, but that's going to show you real spam complaints, not what your ESP gives you, because that data is wrong ultimately. And you know, that challenge is that the complaint rates can spiral quickly if it's not monitored ultimately, and few spam complaints can trigger deliverability issues that affects just the portion of your subscriber base or even a bigger side of things. So some of the things that I think about when you're thinking about prevention around complaints is very simple. One, make sure you got all your technical and authentication stuff done. I talked about it, your SPF, your DKIMs, DMARC, your Google Postmaster Tool, Yahoo Postmaster Tools, all that stuff, right? Good consistent address and sender names. That's an easy one. Unsubscribe links work ultimately. And then of course, just monitoring all that data. That's number one. Number 2, I think about the content and design, right? Look, you guys have all heard that spam trigger words or phrases and subject lines, that's still a thing as much as people don't like it. The second thing that I know agencies hate hearing is like maintaining a good text-image ratio because they want to be able to understand what you're sending that email. If it's not spam, they want to know that it's not spam ultimately, right? And then of course, making sure those unsubscribe links are easy to do. And I think a lot of the Recent 2024 updates have really forced a lot of this into the world anyways, which is why I don't know about you, Chase, but my spam junk email box is not as bad as ever. And I think it's just because more people are following and abiding and it's protecting me ultimately. And the junk is going into junk email these days, right?

Yeah.

And then the last thing I think about is like the subscriber lifecycle management for kind of the complaint prevention. I'm talking about, you know, looking at subscribers. If you're seeing complaints and you're seeing continuous complaints, maybe you should suppress them. Maybe you should reduce your email frequency for For example, right? You also want to be able to identify based on like acquisition sources or, you know, if they're complaining based on a certain email, you're seeing a higher complaint rate on welcome series number 2. Why? Right? These are all things that you can do to create like a suppression plan almost so you can slow down prevention, slow down complaints with prevention ultimately on their behavior ultimately. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. And what's critical to understand is that complaint prevention is much more effective than complaint recovery. You know, once ISPs see you as problematic sender, you know, it's very difficult to rebuild that reputation.

Yeah. There's war stories I have around this stuff over the years of just being on the other side, just learning about it. But ultimately, it's kind of like credit repair. It's easy to crash it, but it's hard to fix it ultimately. And ultimately, the best way to protect yourself is prevention. It's much easier than fixing the problems after they occur. And, you know, look, people are going to ask me, what's the industry standard? And we all know what Yahoo— Google's is, right? 0.3% is what they want. You want to be under 0.3%, which means 3 complaints per 1,000, which sounds incredibly hard. But the reality is it's kind of the standard these days. And ISPs are penalizing people like Gmail, for example. And when you think about, you know, what can I do to reduce it? I know what you're thinking about. Like, what are some examples? Well, A, you got to make sure you have a good cadence around your technical deliverability, right? Making sure that all your, you know, your IP addresses and your, you know, bounce handling and your list cleaning and all that stuff is there. And then even any kind of monitoring services, always helpful. The second thing I think about is really, you know, looking at your content. Sometimes reason is because your content just plain sucks and doesn't resonate with the person on the other end and making sure you have clear benefit-focused subject lines rather than clickbait or misleading content. Those are all ways to reduce content. I've definitely hit the spam button when I felt like I was tricked into opening email. As opposed to just being told what you're selling on the other side. And one often overlooked factor, and I mentioned it earlier, is your acquisition source quality. I think people overlook this, that they'll go to a channel, they'll get really cheap subscribers, and they'll be like, man, my list is growing and all that stuff. But the reality is certain channels have more likeliness to complain than others ultimately. Have you seen that before? Hey, okay, I'm disrupting the pod for just a quick 60-second break and a quick little shout out to our title sponsors of the podcast. Omnisend. Okay, for those that don't know, Omnisend is an all-in-one email and SMS marketing automation platform specifically designed for e-commerce brands. They make it super easy to engage with customers, drive repeat sales, and create those seamless personal experiences we're always talking about. Here's 3 things I love about Omnisend. First and foremost, they're trusted by over 125,000 e-commerce merchants worldwide that absolutely love them. What they 4.8 rating star with over 6,000 reviews on the Shopify App Store. It's an obvious choice for your email, SMS, and push needs. Secondly, I love great customer support, and Omnisend, they're absolutely nailing it. They're responsive, their help docs are great, and their team is absolutely fantastic. And third, they have great features and better pricing. Pricing matters just as much as features, and Omnisend, you're gonna get both of those. They have all the features you need for your store, and their pricing is absolutely fantastic. In fact, recently I just heard a story about 2 community members that made the switch. One reduced his price from $8,500 to $3,500, which is huge, but even bigger, that $3,500 included SMS, which is absolutely wild. Then another agency I just recently talked to, they just switched their entire client base over, and he's been saving his clients anywhere from 30 to 60% off their bill, which is allowing him to take that money and reinvest invested on the top of the funnel so they can make more ads and make more money. Omnisend nails these 3 things that I care most about: great support, great features, and fair pricing. Plus, I just helped Chase make the move to Omnisend with his own personal email list, and their migration was super easy. They even have a team to help you, support you, and they have a great automated tool to bring your contacts right over. So if you're looking to take your email marketing to the next level, I highly recommend checking out Omnisend. They got the tools, the automation, the expertise to help your brands grow and thrive. Head over to omnisend.com/sendit to learn more and start scaling your customer engagement today. Now let them know Chase and Jimmy sent you. Now let's get back to the pod.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, we've seen brands where social media acquired subs have, you know, anywhere between like 3 to 5 times higher complaint rates than email opt-ins from their website.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is kind of a negative side to paid media when you're forcing your product or service in front of people and they weren't shopping They're a different type of subscriber than someone who's searching on Google or ChatGPT or whatever, looking for something, right? And tracking those complaints by acquisition source helps you identify those lead generation problems. And that's sometimes the problem that comes into place before you even think about any of your systems or anything else that comes into play, things. So we recommend weekly complaint rate monitoring, at least monthly, and make sure if you're looking at any spikes that you're going in and investigating that.

For sure. And the key is treating deliverability protection as an ongoing kind of operational requirement, not a one-time setup task.

No, I love that. And look, let's wrap this thing up because I feel like we gave a ton of information, probably talked about more about unsubscribing and spam complaints than anybody else in the world about this stuff. But it's because it matters a lot. And we hope that you understand that this is really the, you know, the importance of minimizing unsubscribes and complaints. while maintaining a strong email marketing performance at scale ultimately. Chase, what's your favorite takeaway as we talked about this thing?

I'd say kind of the most important takeaway from my opinion is these kind of dark side metrics. They're not just vanity numbers. They directly impact your ability to reach subscribers and kind of customers' inboxes and ultimately be able to drive revenue through your email channel.

Yeah, I mean, I've seen brands, they celebrate a 50% open rate, but they're ignoring their 2% unsubscribe rate, which means that you're losing 2% of your audience every time you send your Yeah. And they're not realizing that is ultimately destroying their sender reputation, their long-term performance. And there's going to be so many repercussions around it. All right. So let me break it down. 5 things we've talked about. Frequency and timing. It's the number 1 root of unsubscribes, right? That's overwhelming them with too many or too little emails. Ultimately, they forget you or they feel like you're overwhelming them. Content relevance. That's number 2. Good segmentation, knowing where they are in their cycle. That's always going to be a key there. Good expectation and transparency. That was the 3rd thing we talked about. You mentioned list hygiene, which is very important. You've got to be thinking about it constantly. Identify the problematic subscribers. You can literally see them in your dashboard. If you're seeing them complain a lot, get rid of them or suppress them or email them less frequently, frequently ultimately. And then of course, getting more into the prevention space by safeguarding your ability to reach long-term inboxes by really just making sure you're being proactive, not reactive. And industry benchmarks, I mean, look, 0.5% unsubscribe rates, lower than 0.2% to 0.3% complaint rates. And then of course, you want to have at least a 20% to 30% engagement rate over 90 days. So a subscriber over 90 days of the 100 emails you might send them over 90 days, I'm being very aggressive here, but if you send them 100 emails, you want them to at least open and engage 20% to 30% of those ultimately. And remember, these metrics become more critical as you scale. Look, small percentages at large volume can seriously damage your email program. And the key to monitoring these metrics is constantly taking proactive action rather than waiting for the problem to compound. Chasing the problem is so much more of a headache ultimately.

Yeah. And for listeners who haven't been tracking these metrics, start by establishing baselines and industry benchmark comparisons before implementing kind of your optimization strategies. And don't try to optimize everything at once. Focus on your biggest problem area first, whether that's frequency, relevance, or maybe deliverability issues. And the brands that are gonna succeed long-term are those who are gonna balance kind of the growth ambitions with subscriber satisfaction and the deliverability protection that we talked about.

No, what a good pod, man. I think this is a wrap for this pod, episode 46, the dark side of email marketing. We're talking minimizing unsubscribing complaint rates. Listen guys, if you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you subscribe, follow, leave us a rating on your favorite podcast listening platform. We are a YouTube first show. You can find our video and our pretty faces on YouTube. So if you're listening to this and you want to see that, jump over to YouTube. But you can also follow the show on X, LinkedIn, IG, TikTok, anywhere basically social media. We're out there. Look, there's a few ways to connect with us too. Number one, as always, we have a newsletter, ecomemailmarketer.com. We'll drop it in the show notes. Come subscribe. We've got this 12 brand breakdown we're giving away for free. We set We send out a daily email with preferences that you can reduce if you don't want that, but we send a great email and education out. Secondly, we've got a great course. Uh, we give a certification program out there where it's 25 hours of Chase and I, we're talking about a lot of this stuff. So if you've enjoyed what we've talked about here or any of our previous pods and you want to learn more, we'll drop a link in the show notes below. And last but not least, we're also found on social media. Chase, where do they find you?

Most platforms chase Noe and Diamond.

Yeah, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube, Threads. I think you're everywhere ultimately. So go check him out. He drops some gems and some great infographics in the market. And you can find me mostly on LinkedIn and X. That's where I post most of my stuff. So come follow us, come check us out, come chat with us, whatever it might be. With that being said, Chase, I'll see you next week.

Cheers, man.

All right, bud. From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.