Newsberry

Unsubscribe Exit Surveys with Wufoo

This entry was posted on July 29, 2009 by Natalie Nagele and is filed under Subscriber behavior, Survey.

Ever wonder why people unsubscribe from your list? We recently released a feature that allows you to show a custom Unsubscribe confirmation page. We had a lot of requests for it, especially with so many international customers needing it in different languages. With this new feature, we decided to do study to see why users were unsubscribing from our Beanstalk list. Here’s what we did.

Using an awesome web survey system called Wufoo, we redirected our Unsubscribe confirmation to a quick (quick = short) survey asking why they unsubscribed. Wufoo let’s you customize the survey, so you’ll see it looks very similar to the Beanstalk site.

We spent some time figuring out the right questions to ask our subscribers that were relevant to our list. We decided on these four (plus comments section):

• I don’t remember subscribing
• The content was not relevant to me
• I receive too many emails from Beanstalk
• Email address is no longer active
• Any comments that can help us improve?

The Campaign

Our entire list of Beanstalk customers consists of those who have signed up to use the service (same as Newsberry, actually). We sent them a campaign announcing several new features that would make using the application easier. In Newsberry, we linked the Wufoo form for the Unsubscribe confirmation page.

And that’s it. We sent the campaign, and waited for the survey responses to roll in.

Results

Of those that clicked Unsubscribe in our email, 82% actually filled out the survey! The results really surprised us. Here are the results from the survey, which can be generated easily in Wufoo.

• I don’t remember subscribing – 40%
• The content was not relevant to me – 40%
• I receive too many emails from Beanstalk – 12%
• Email address is no longer active – 8%

A good number of subscribers actually added some comments that explained their answer (no longer have an account, not using the account anymore, etc). What surprised us, is the first two reasons were the two we thought would get the least response. All our subscribers subscribed to receive the emails during the signup process. Also, we would expect that any information about new features or updates is relevant to people using the application.

What we learned

For starters, we need to segment our Beanstalk emails better. We didn’t remove any users who haven’t logged in or used their account for a particular time. This meant we ended up sending to people who weren’t using our application anymore, so obviously the information wasn’t relative to them!

We also decided to re-evaluate the signup and email subscription process. We’re considering separating the subscription options so people can opt-out of Features and Updates emails. This way, we continue to send important emails to our customers (system status updates, important system changes and requirements) but let some customers opt-out from the rest.

As far as sending too many emails, we’ve realized that we just can’t please everyone. The last email we sent to these customers was almost 3 months prior. We can’t imagine sending any less.

Other recommendations for your surverys

The questions we asked were tailored to our needs, but you can ask a variety of questions. Here are some other useful questions to ask that will help you learn more about your sending practice. Of course, always remember to keep it short. This is free, valuable information, so make sure you tailor it to meet your particular subscription.

I receive too many emails in my Inbox

I’m no longer interested in your product (store, information, etc)

I receive too many emails from you, and would like to receive less

I signed up for a specific reason (event, product information, etc) and no longer interested

I have trouble understanding/seeing your emails

Interested in performing the same survey? Let us know if we can help, or if you’d like to share your results with us.