UnSubscribe Page Case Study: How PetDoors.com Made Subscribers Stay

Google has hinted on it, content strategists cannot emphasize on it enough, and some brands bank on it like their celebrity endorsers! We are talking about what Daniel Goleman made popular with his book, Emotional Intelligence, the most underrated component of online content marketing – Emotional Quotient!

But now we have proof! One of our clients, the seller of dog and cat doors, PetDoors.com introduced an emotional twist (see screenshot below) on their Unsubscribe page and saw remarkable results. How remarkable?

An 82.2 % decrease (unsubscribe rate fell from 1.40% to 0.25%) in unsubscription from their prevailing unsubscription rate. How did we do that? Let’s find out.

Page: petdoors.com/unsub
Mandate:
We observed that our unsubscribe rates were very high. After some discussion, we thought we would try removing the “one-click” unsubscribe link and instead implement an unsubscribe page, where the user would need to take one extra step to unsubscribe. On this page, we would have a chance to change their minds. We added some cute sad dog pictures that read “You don’t want to be friends anymore? That’s fine. We understand – Scout, Mikey, & Taffy

Now, who could say goodbye to those puppy eyes! 🙂

Improvement:
The page was created September 24th 2015. The unsubscribe page is probably the only page that we want a high bounce rate for, and we used this number to track its success. We wanted to see people landing on the page, and leaving without entering their email into the unsubscribe field.

The current bounce rate is 82.89% for petdoors.com/unsub. We started sending out emails March 10th of 2014, and for the first year and a half we saw unsub rates of around 1.40%. From October 1st 2015 until now, the unsubscribe rate decreased to around .25%. The first email that we sent out understandably had a huge unsub rate due to invalid email addresses, so we have corrected for that to determine our unsubscribe rate has dropped 74% since adding the additional step at the unsubscribe page.

Data:
Bounce rate is 82.89% for petdoors.com/unsub

From Oct 1, 2015 to now, we’ve sent 6,067,164 emails and had 15,176 unsubs.
From Mar 10, 2014 to Sept 30, 2015 we sent 6,342,597 emails and had 88,971 unsubs.

The unsubscribe rate fell from 1.40% to 0.25%, a decrease of 82.2%. If you remove the initial unsubs we had in March 2014, our unsub rate is still 74% lower since adding the petdoors.com/unsub step

Charts from Listrak:

Subscribes & Unsubscribes July 30th-Present

Subscriber Unsubscribes Jan 30th-Present

The results PetDoors achieved reinforce the fact that we must address humans and do not leave out human emotions when writing, designing, and developing for the web. After all, the best online content strategies are those that are designed to stimulate human responses (both intellectual and emotional) and not simply to generate clicks.

Our association with PetDoors goes beyond our common love for dogs and we are so happy to see this campaign resulting in such favorable results! We congratulate PetDoors and wish them more success in future.

CueBlocks offers customized online marketing solutions and bespoke email marketing campaigns to help brands reap the maximum benefits of their efforts and investments.

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Nosheen

I am a writer, reader, and a part time adventure and travel enthusiast. The other three things that vie for my mind share are dark chocolate, coffee, and photography. I am highly motivated by user perspectives and addressing the common human experience when I write.

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