At Movio, we send a lot of emails – last month alone we sent over 93 million globally. Exhibitors work hard to increase their loyalty membership base and, in turn, increase the number of email subscribers they can engage with. But what concern is paid to members who are unsubscribing? Loyalty recruitment efforts can be nullified when retention strategies are non-existent or ignored.

When considering subscriber churn, I’ve always liked the analogy of a leaky bucket; reasonable effort needs to be made to plug the leaks before the bucket can be filled. Lost members are a lot harder to recover than new members, and their renewed loyalty comes at a far greater price. By reducing subscriber churn, your subscriber engagement increases, allowing for more effective communication efforts and greater customer loyalty.

So why are your members unsubscribing? Why are they complaining? Are best practices being followed? Does your communication strategy meet the legal requirements you are bound to? Are members receiving what they expected when they signed up? What unsubscribe trends can be identified, and how can they be overcome?

Subscription Categories

Often, as email marketers, we have very distinct member segments that we want to tailor our campaigns to; such as students, seniors, VIPs, or young mothers. Each segment is likely to have a different promotion, offer, and look-and-feel for their campaigns. Subscription categories allow members to unsubscribe from certain communications while still receiving others. Subscription categories are important for subscriber retention, as they allow members to specify what they want to receive, without having to opt-out of all communications.

Without a subscription category framework in place, email marketers are removing the ability for their members to say what they want to receive. For example, a recent graduate may no longer wish to receive student communications for which they no longer qualify, but they’ll likely still want to receive VIP offers. Another member may now want to opt-in to the young mothers communications to receive promotions relevant for their current stage of life. Movio Cinema campaigns have a one-to-one relationship between campaigns and subscription categories. If a member unsubscribes from a particular campaign, they are unsubscribed from the associated subscription category. Members are also able to manage their subscription preferences, allowing them to unsubscribe from one subscription category, and sign up for another. If all communication is managed by a single subscription status, and a member unsubscribes, then they can no longer be contacted at all.

A subscription category framework can help improve subscriber retention by allowing members to specify which types of communication they want to receive, and which types they don’t.

Campaign Reporting

For every campaign sent via Movio Cinema, a Campaign Report is generated, providing real-time reporting on its delivery metrics. The performance of each campaign should be measured to gain insights that can be used as input for future campaigns and overarching communication strategies. When a campaign reports a spike in unsubscribes, it is important to identify what caused this:

• Was the campaign targeted at the appropriate member segment?
• Was the campaign consistent with previous communications sent?
• Did the campaign fail to align with the expectations members had when subscribing (frequency, content, and channel of communication)?
• Could any of the content be deemed offensive or objectionable?
• Was the campaign sent on behalf of a third-party business provider?

As exhibitors can send upwards of 30 campaigns each week, it can be a fairly time-consuming task monitoring campaign reports for anomalies after each execution. Movio Cinema provides campaign summary reports, allowing reporting metrics to be displayed in a table format across multiple campaigns. This provides an easy means of identifying anomalies in campaign reports, and of comparing campaign delivery metrics between multiple campaigns.

Pay close attention to campaign reports, and put time into analysing poor performing campaigns, so as to learn from past mistakes and refine your communication strategy moving forward.

Long Term Trends

In order to avoid losing the forest for the trees, it’s important to monitor how week-to-week efforts are trending over longer periods of time. The Movio Cinema Marketing Dashboard provides a monthly breakdown for all of the key email marketing metrics, spanning the past 24 months. This dashboard allows marketers to see how effective their efforts have been at reducing the number of members unsubscribing, or marking communications as spam. Having spam complaint rates below 0.05% and unsubscribe rates below 0.1% is a good benchmark. These numbers should be trending down, or flat lining. If the trend is showing an increase in the rates at which people are leaving your subscriber database, then your communication strategy needs to be reviewed, and analysis performed to identify the root cause(s) for the increases.

Long-term analysis is required in order to effectively measure the return on initiatives and strategies, and ensure your week-to-week efforts are taking you in the right direction.

Data Science Insights

Our Data Science team love finding member clusters, insights, and other data goodness that can help exhibitors make more informed strategy decisions. There are a number of different variables that can be reviewed to identify potential causes for members unsubscribing, such as, frequency of campaigns a member is receiving, day of the week members are unsubscribing, or the time of day. Below, I have looked at the number of campaigns a member has received when they unsubscribed, to see if any correlations could be identified, or insights gathered. What inspired this was a promotional email that I received from a clothing company, one week after making a purchase from them. I hadn’t been asked to sign up to their mailing list at the time of purchase, nor given an option to opt-out of their communications, yet I was now seemingly in their database. My hypothesis was that marketers operating these sorts of practices would see a significantly higher number of unsubscribes happening after the first few campaigns a member received.

Taking a look at exhibitor data, I found one example where I would suspect a similar practice is being followed. On the graph above, we can see that there is a massive spike of members who are unsubscribing after receiving just a few campaigns. In fact, the most common time for a member to unsubscribe is after they have received their second campaign. Most countries have legal opt-in requirements in order to start emailing promotional campaigns to members. Best practice recommends double-opt-in, where a confirmation email is sent to the registered email address, and an activation link must be clicked in order to join a mailing list.

Dodging these practices might seem like a cunning way of growing your subscriber list quickly, but it really just results in a higher rate of unsubscribes, complaints, and unengaged recipients. This will have a negative impact on your sending reputation, which will have a negative impact on your inbox placement rate, which, in the end, will reduce the audience that you are able to reach. A bell-shaped curve was observed for another exhibitor, as shown below:

For this exhibitor, most unsubscribing members unsubscribe around the 15-campaign mark. In this case, members have likely signed up, given the mailing list a reasonable go, but then unsubscribed as they didn’t feel they were getting any real value from the communications. Are campaigns providing personalised content, such as a member’s point balance? Are the promotions aligned with the film preferences and cinema behaviour of the recipient group? What customer expectations are failing to be met, at this point in the customer lifecycle, to result in these unsubscribes?

Dive into your data and see what trends and correlations can be found, to help identify why members are unsubscribing from your program.

Summary

• Implement subscription categories to allow members to have greater control of the type of content they receive.
• Analyze poor performing campaigns to identify what has caused them to perform so poorly, and learn from these insights.
• Step back and look at your communication strategy from a higher level, to ensure your marketing efforts are having the intended effect.
• Leverage big data solutions to identify trends and correlations in the behaviour of unsubscribing members, and address each accordingly.