No matter how relaxed or confident you feel in your own abilities, the unexpected peak in unsubscribes brings a stab of fear. Your immediate reaction is to change something. Your first assumption is that your are doing something wrong and your email marketing list is suffering.

There is only one truth, and that is that any sudden increase in any metric has to have a cause. If it is out of the blue then it might well be something that you have no control over. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do something to compensate.

We’ll cover other aspects in later articles, but for the moment let us assume that the increase is more marked in one of your segmented email lists. This will be a relief as it means the reason is probably easily identifiable. All you need to do is isolate it.

Identify all those who have unsubscribed and work towards discovering the link between them. Remember that some customers will unsubscribe for reasons other than the one which generated the spike.

You might find that one metric is common to all. The next thing to do is to see if those who unsubscribed from other segmented lists had this in common. However, the norm is that it will be a combination of two or more metrics.

You might find that a majority of those who unsubscribed had only recently joined your lists. This alone might not be enough to identify the cause as others recently joined seemed happy enough. See if there are differences between those who left and those who stayed. Perhaps you have recently had participated in a number of trade fairs with bonuses for those who gained the most subscribers.

Check the source of the subscribers who have shown they wanted out. Perhaps one of your staff had not explained matters fully to those who shared their email addresses.

There will be a cause for a spike in a segmented email marketing list. Don’t make radical changes to your campaigns immediately. Discover the reason first.

We’ll cover other scenarios in future articles.