Unsubscribes: Spring Cleaning for Your Customer List
As a small business, your customer relationships are critical to success. Our Account Managers work closely with countless Farmers to build their Customer List. Growing those relationships with consistent communication results in customers who are increasingly loyal and buy from you habitually.
Buyers today expect to routinely hear from the businesses they support, and will purchase more frequently when they’re reminded to place orders. As we say again and again, “Regular communication to regular customers leads to regular sales.”
Your inbox is becoming a social feed.
Email is a powerful tool to stay top-of-mind with your customers and remind them to order, to share about your products and showcase your brand. While 90% of buyers want to purchase local food, they won’t think to buy from you unless you remind them often. Inboxes are becoming social feeds—most people do not read and sort their email (they just have one ever-growing inbox). Businesses are sending (and buyers receiving) more emails, because if the email isn’t at the top of page one, they may never see it.
Our most successful Farmers use Automated Order Reminders (send via email with one click to shop), as well as regular newsletters and quick bulk emails to announce new products or send a brief Farm update. This type of communication not only builds customer buying habits, but trust and familiarity with you, your Farm, and your food.
While building relationships with the majority of your customers, you should expect some recipients will unsubscribe. If a ‘customer’ unsubscribes from your emails, don’t take it personally—it’s normal across every industry. For every 1000 emails you send you should expect 3+ people to unsubscribe. When a business (in this case, your Farm) first starts sending email to a customer list, those first few emails batches may have higher rates of unsubscribes. After that, you can expect a smaller, ‘normal’ amount of unsubscribes as part of your regular email marketing.
Email recipients who choose to unsubscribe are not your customers.
When someone unsubscribes, they’re effectively “Spring Cleaning” your list, and saying they aren’t going to purchase. By the time someone unsubscribes, they’ve likely not been an active customer for over a year and have no intention of being a customer. People move to other geographies, or don’t have time to build a relationship. You want to spend your time and energy on customers that are going to respond to relationship building, who care about your products and are most likely to buy on a regular basis. THAT is a list worth building!
Some commerce companies actually remove customers from their email list proactively—automatically unsubscribing those who have not made a purchase in the last 6+ months or those who haven’t opened emails or responded in a while. These companies are looking to spend their time on the customers that are a good match and will buy from them. They purposefully spend time and energy on the customers that matter most.
The benefit of Unsubscribes:
You’re talking to people who are listening, instead of sending emails to people who aren’t interested. When people unsubscribe from your communications, your email list becomes more effective. You’re sending information to a higher percentage of people who are likely to read, engage and buy from you.
You’re getting better data, instead of getting lost in the abyss. When people unsubscribe, you can gauge more accurate interest and tune your strategy accordingly. If 20 of 100 recipients never plan to purchase, then it’s more effective to target messaging to the 80 who will. By only sending to those 80, you can see what subject line, content and promotions actually turn into sales.
At the end of the day, email is an active channel that reaches out to make people aware of your Farm and your products. Email helps you to build loyal customers who welcome engaging with your brand and content, and want to buy your products.
If you’re a current Barn2Door customer, please check out our Mailchimp integration!
If you are a Farm curious about how Barn2Door can make it easy for your Farm to build relationships with local customers, we encourage you to learn more and watch this short, 4:57 video.