Press Pause

So I don't want to unsubscribe from your communications, but I don't want them for a while. 

"With the average rate of annual list churn hovering around 20-30 percent or more for most companies, marketers must make every effort to retain as many subscribers as possible, and one way to do this is to present them with options when they click unsubscribe," according to Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for Silverpop. 


Anyway,when I got an email from What Car? ( which I'll be honest, I don't even remember signing up for) my first thought was to unsubscribe, or at least see what options I got given.


Well I got this page shown to me. Of course the normal way of unsubscribing is there of course, but also the opportunity to pause from the What Car? emails for 30 days. Which is a great start ( I think there is a massive opportunity to do this in many sectors for example travel, after all, I don't book holidays every week).

But why 30 days?

That just looks like its the auto setting for the email platform. A more elegant solution would be to offer different periods based on the sector. So, in the instance of What Car?, I may not be looking at buying a car for 6 months or so. Maybe I might want to start my research again in 3, so offer me 90 days?


Of course it's a a brave move by brands to offer NOT to send emails out for a while, but it can obviously pay dividends. As in the case of WhatCar?, they will  know the email subsriber is more likely to be closer to buying hence providing some information for any Marketing Automation or Lead Scoring programme in the background.


And it's certainly being more customer centric