When you take a look at one of your lists, you’ll notice that along with your average open and click rates, we also show you your average subscribe rate and a target subscribe rate.   The target rate is the number of new subscribers you want to aim for each month to keep your list growth “in the black.”

Looks like we’re doing pretty well at the moment (whew!) but if your number is below your target rate, there are a couple of things you can try. You’ll want to be sure that your signup forms are visible in all of your different “homes” online. If you have a Facebook fan page, be sure to add a signup form to your Facebook page using our Signup App.There’s also a plugin available for your WordPress blog.
You could also create a fun giveaway to create some buzz around the list and give people incentive to sign up. Here’s an example of the giveaway we did with DesignLab to help grow their list. (ProTip: People love plushies almost as much as they love t-shirts!)

If your unsubscribe rate is starting to dip too far below your target, you may want to take a look at some things:

How often are you sending? It could be that your list is losing momentum if you’re emailing too infrequently, or they’re feeling overwhelmed by emails if you’re sending too often. If you started out as a weekly newsletter, but want to bump it up to daily sends, you want to be careful about how you do it.

Is your content relevant? Are you sending the type of content that your subscribers were expecting when they originally signed up, or have you changed drastically from that initial subject? Straying too far from the original topic without warning can cause attrition. If folks signed up initially to get advice about modifying classic cars, they might not appreciate diary entries from your dog, no matter how cute he is.

Finally, you may also take a look at your unsubscribe survey results to get an idea of why people are leaving the list. And remember, our smarter bounce management methods keep you from losing too many valid subscribers at a time.

Happy list growing!

When someone unsubscribes from your mailing list, MailChimp can automatically notify Salesforce to mark the corresponding lead or contact record as having “opted out” of further email communication. That way, you can easily keep your MailChimp and Salesforce data in synch, and MailChimp will empower your customers to manage their own preferences across all your communication channels.

This post will explain the easy steps for setting up a MailChimp “WebHook” that will send the unsubscribe notifications, as well as the Visualforce page that will listen for the notifications and update any relevant Salesforce records.

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One of the features we recently implemented in MailChimp V5 is an unsubscribe survey so that your users can tell you why they no longer want to receive your emails.

While this feature is a step in the right direction, it clearly doesn’t help our international users to only have the form available in English. That’s why we’re asking for your help with translations in the 30+ languages we support elsewhere in the app.

Just head over to the form we’ve set up, select the language you can help translate, and enter the appropriate text for the six multiple choice selections. We’ll be compiling and comparing these for the next couple months and will keep you posted when they go live in the app. Also: If you’re willing to and have time, we’d love your help translating the text elements of our new polling feature so that we can offer that in multiple languages as well. You’ll see these fields at the bottom of the unsubscribe survey translation form.

Update: Lots of our users have found the reactivation process helpful, and we’ve updated this post so the process is clearer. Updates to the original post appear in bold.

Note: The reactivation process only works for users who have a history of sending with MailChimp. If you import a list and go through this process before sending with MailChimp, chances are that we’ll unsubscribe more of your list than you’d like. That’s because there’s a rating system in the app that tracks subscriber activity and engagement, and the engagement data isn’t applied until you’ve sent a few campaigns to your list. The more history you have with sending through MailChimp, the more accurate our engagement data will be.

Last week, Ben blogged about how MailChimp allows you to segment your mailing list by activity. He gave several good examples of how you can use the tool effectively, but I’d like to show you how to use it to reactivate inactive subscribers and remove subscribers who don’t want to be on your list.

If you’ve ever received a subscription to a magazine, you know that as you approach the end of your subscription, you start receiving letters in the mail about renewing your subscription. And it’s never just one: You get a series of letters, all designed to move you to action. It may seem like overkill, but there’s good research showing that a renewal series is more effective at retaining subscribers than a single renewal notice. Renewals can get lost, thrown away, or forgotten in a pile of mail. Sending a series of renewals increases the likelihood that a subscriber will renew if he desires, or that he’ll make an active decision not to renew.

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A little while back we mentioned some spam filters were automatically clicking every single link inside of email campaigns, to check out the reputation of the landing page.

The problem was that these spam filters were also automatically clicking our one-click unsubscribe link. While it’s not a widespread problem (yet), we have started to receive calls about unwanted unsubscribes. We traced most back to Trend Micro.

Anyway, most people recommended a 2-step unsubscribe process in response to this. And that’s a logical recommendation.

But whenever I actually work up the energy to click an unsubscribe link, I want off. NOW. Taking me to a landing page where I have to click yet another button—or even worse—enter my email address again, is not acceptable. It just looks pathetic. Like it’s a lame attempt to keep me trapped on the list. Especially when the confirmation buttons are confusing:

“Yes, I don’t want to unsubscribe” and “No, I want to stay on the list.”

Our programmer (The Chad) came up with a novel workaround, allowing us to keep the one-click convenience, while using the 2-step as a fallback…

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