How to be unsubscribed on your first email

Pete

I spend a lot of time talking about data (dull but very worthy) especially when it relates to email marketing and the ability to personalise your email communications. Each level of personalisation helps improve response rates which, on its own, is a mighty fine reason to personalise.

However no amount of personalisation will help the following from Mortgage Adviser. They've emailed me to thank me for visiting their stand at the Mortgage Business Expo - the thing is I wasn't there - I was on holiday that day.

So the first email communication I have ever had from them is complete pants. Want to lay a bet on how long it took for me to click the unsubscribe button? It's activity like this that helps get brands blacklisted as spam. Users don't have much recourse against large brands but quite often they will report irrelevant email as spam even if you think it is relevant to them - they do it as an act of revenge. So not only are your unsubscribe statistics a good indicator for how well you are targeting your email comm's but so is any spam reports.

So personalisation for email marketing is key but it's not a replacement for paying attention.