Embrace the Unroll, Email Marketers

MailChimp revealed to the world this week that Unroll.me is working really freaking well at its mission of getting people to unsubscribe from emails they don’t want. For the folks sending those emails, it offers some important lessons—and improves the quality of their subscriber lists.

December has been a pretty good month in the life of running an email newsletter. Well, mostly.

The work I’ve done with Tedium has been creatively fulfilling, and it’s also offered a lot of opportunities to scratch itches that I might not have scratched otherwise. It’s gotten me diving into code again—editing emails to ensure they work in every variant of Outlook (and giving me fodder for blog posts elsewhere), and trying to experiment with Ghost to see what it can do. In a lot of ways, I’ve been learning how to walk in a new way.

And the newsletter has been giving me some opportunities I perhaps may not have had without a lot of extra hustling. Earlier this month, I wrote my first big-time freelance piece in years, and I’ve gotten my work in Tedium published by a number of sites I’ve admired over the years, like Neatorama, and some up-and-coming sites that are blowing my mind, like Ratter.

So I had pretty mixed feelings when I got this email this morning from the friendly folks at Mailchimp:

It explained a lot: One night in particular, I sent an email a little later than usual, and suddenly I had more unsubscribes on that particular issue than I had ever seen before. It didn’t seem natural that that many people would click on the unsubscribe button just because I sent it a little late.

The recently released Unroll.me app, which effectively turns email unsubscribes into a game, with your finger the weapon, makes it harder in some ways to understand the motivations behind your departing readers—were they sick of the emails because they came too often? Did they get bored of the content? By effectively turning email unsubscribes into a game, Unroll.me has taken out all the extra crap that comes with an unsubscribe—for good and bad.

But honestly, I think that the increase in unsubscribes of this nature speaks to something I’ve pondered a lot in the roughly 365 days I’ve been working on Tedium: The concept of engagement, and how it differs via platforms.

Building a subscriber base from scratch is hard.

Email, I admit, is a challenging platform to win people over in. Speaking in Infinity Blade 3 terms, it’s a large, blunt weapon: You can’t hit people nearly as often as you can with something lighter, and it makes it harder to defend yourself, but when you use it correctly, it packs a wallop. Apologies to the Slack era, but people still read emails.

However, doing a personal email—especially in the essay-style format that I’ve taken on—is the very definition of an uphill battle: You have to fight harder to get people to notice you, and it’s extremely easy for them to disengage. But the folks who do engage—roughly a third of my subscribers read every issue—are in it for the long haul.

The challenge for me in losing more subscribers due to a sudden surge in popularity for Unroll.me is not losing the people who open the issues and do a deep dive into the topics I cover. I think, in a lot of ways, the issue is sort of the inverse of what it looks like.

When you unsubscribe from an email, you generally do it because you were ignoring it anyway and you’re already drowning in emails from your family, your co-workers, and your loved ones. I’ve tried to send Tedium late at night, treating it as counter-programming, playing with the idea that it’ll perhaps be the last thing you read before you go to bed—but if you hold onto it until later in the week, I don’t mind.

I think that too much content begs for your attention in an unearned way, whether by being too click-baity or by screwing with the reader’s emotions and intentions. One dumbs down our discourse; one inflames it and damages our critical thinking. With Tedium, I basically decided to do everything the opposite of how everyone else handles content online. I didn’t launch a website for seven months. I’ve focused on topics that are the opposite of viral but were interesting. I syndicate like crazy, because it introduces the content to the niches of people that are going to find it interesting.

If I lose a few subscribers along the way, that’s OK! It’s not for them. It ensures that I’m improving and tightening my focus as I grow.

Unroll.me makes us work harder. But that’s OK.

The problem is, most marketers don’t think of their content this way—they see email as the easy way out, the cheap source for constant clicks. They’re making it easy for people to drop out entirely.

If anything, Unroll.me is doing me—and a lot of other email marketers and pundits—a service. They’re improving the quality of my reader lists by getting the people who were on the fence anyway to step away.

If there was one thing I could add to their service, it’d be a way to add more feedback to the process. The data I could gain by losing disengaged readers could help me strengthen the work I’m already doing, so maybe next time, I won’t lose that reader.

To put it simply: Unroll.me isn’t the problem, disengaged readers are. Creating something that people are passionate about is a hell of a challenge, and Unroll.me is forcing email marketers to work harder to prove that they’re offering something valuable and useful, that ensures people stick around.

By getting people to become more proactive about managing their junk mail, Unroll.me is doing the internet a huge service. Thanks, guys.

Ernie Smith is the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. You should follow along. But only if you want to.