Here’s Why Your Mobile Subscribers Are Opting Out

So your marketing department has put together an impressive list of mobile subscribers, and in general, things appear to be going along fantastically. But as time goes on and you watch your numbers, you can’t help but notice that a small yet noticeable percentage of people are opting out, leaving your mobile subscription list.

Granted, no one likes to be rejected, so this rankles a bit. It makes you wonder why anyone would want to distance themselves from your wonderful company. What’s gone wrong? Is it them? Is it you?

It’s probably you, and here’s some reasons why. Any similarity between these opt-out reasons and reasons why couples break up are purely coincidental.

Probably…

You Talk Too Much

We all have that person in our life who drones on and on, until eventually we can’t take it anymore, and say something like “Would you please shut it!?” Your subscribers can’t say that to you when your business sends too many texts (well, actually they can, but it doesn’t do them any good), so instead they vote with their feet, or to be more precise, with their finger on their mouse, clicking on the “opt out” link.

What’s defined as talking too much? Conventional marketing wisdom says that you should only send one or two messages per week for each marketing campaign or promotion. More than that is overkill, and any savvy marketer is aware that their business is probably not the only one that their subscribers are getting texts from. You don’t want to have a hand in inundating these poor folks.

They Sobered Up

Don’t laugh, this is actually a thing. Picture, if you will, a group of friends who go to their favorite local pub and during the course of the evening, they end up all having quite a few. Then one of them happens to see a promotional flyer, where people can sign up for the establishment’s exclusive club and get on their text messaging list. Since alcohol tends to encourage not well thought out actions, everyone signs up.

The following week, the subscribers start getting the promotional texts, and everyone is wondering why on Earth they’re getting what amounts to commercials sent to their smart phones. Then their memory, no longer drowning in lager, kicks in and they remember. Their next action usually is to opt out.

Don’t take it personally. People do all sorts of odd things when they’ve been drinking.

They Have Outgrown You

Perhaps your business offered your subscribers something that interested them a year ago, but at present, not so much. Tastes and trends change, and sometimes people simply move on. There’s not much you can do about this.

They Don’t Like Your Tone

Finally, it may be a case of not liking how you come across. The article “5 Common Reasons Why Mobile Subscribers Opt-Out” touches upon such no-no’s as relying too much on slang, industry terms, acronyms and abbreviations, or text speak. Sometimes, in an effort to come across as hip and current, marketing promotions end up sounding silly, grating, and unprofessional.

And then there’s humor, which at best is a subjective thing. We live in an age where many people have suddenly acquired a very thin skin, and packs of individuals roam the countryside, looking for things to get offended over. Perhaps the joke in that last promotion got someone in a lather, and they opted out.

So, What Can You Do To Stop This?

The moral of the story is: text no more than twice a week, keep it relevant, keep it professional, and offer something worthwhile. It may also be worth trying to put together some kind of follow-up mechanism to use on those who opt out, and find out their reasons why.

For more insights into SMS texting, visit “Email And SMS: A Marketing Marriage Made In Heaven”.

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Four Questions to Ask When it Comes to Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion scientists are all the rage in the digital marketing world and as a client it is often easy to get lost in the myriad of questions that flood into the head when you encounter the term CRO. Even for experts within the domain, conversion remains largely a game of test and run. For more often than naught, the conversion scientist is a marketer who makes sweeping assumptions about the markets based on whatever data they have and then change a few variables. Whether the tweaking gets him the best results is all dependent on his skill.

conversion-optimization

In order to get a better understanding of conversion rate optimization, here are the four questions you should be asking to yourself.

1. How do you define CRO?

This comes right at the top for two particular kinds of people; the clients who are investing in digital marketing and for the newcomer who has just started the road of becoming a digital marketer. In any case, the question itself has multiple different answers depending upon the school of thought you are from.

The most common answer I can think of is by Chris Goward of Wider funnel who spoke of CRO as test practices and tweaking in the variables to find a viable practice. The practice here referred to a particular strategy employed by digital marketers to get more numbers on sales and traffic.

This answer may sound vague to you and that is precisely why this question needs to be asked. For the client who is getting the marketing done, it is often simply about delegating the task without knowing enough about it. That’s a wrong approach right off the bat; get to know what your service provider will be executing as a strategy. Not only does this streamline the process but helps you prioritize your own strategy as well.

2. What Ideas to look at for Testing

If we do go by the convention established for CRO that it is indeed a testing mechanism for ideas and variables to increase traffic or sales then the next logical question has to be this. The problem is that in digital marketing, the variables to play around with are far too many and they vary from industry to industry, niche to niche as you drill down the campaigns. The most common answers you find will talk about:

  • Lowering the bounce rate (getting people to stay)
  • Increasing the number of clicks on the cart or product check
  • Increasing the clicks on certain “read more”

The actual division happens when you find differing trends for different pages within the same website, which can be easily deduced through heat maps.

3. Always go with Data or Innovate

multivirate-testing

Surprisingly, this is one question that often tricks the best of the best in the game. Again regressively, the previous question can bring you to the point where people are getting stuck but it cannot always tell you how to overcome the obstacle. This is where certain feedback tools like survey optimizers can help you in your CRO. But even with these you cannot always expect total accuracy for removing the said obstacles. Take an example of the fact that a regular customer you see at your store is now shopping elsewhere. One day you ask them “hey why do you not come to buy from me anymore?”

In most cases, the average customer will not directly reply that they do not like your service or the product but will go around the question. The digital marketing stream works similarly, you have to rely intuitively to figure out what it is that you should be correcting in your campaign. Often however, the question matters more because you need to know if the niche outlined has produced accurate enough answers.

4. When to stop testing and re-designing

This is the dreaded question for most clients because if you get the latter as the answer then not only does your marketing halt but you also have to invest in design and development. Time and money!

Does that mean this question is any less important? No! Because often the meter points out that there is nothing more to be gotten out of the website and the page you have been working on. Often the marketing stream works by channel segmentation: it divides the website page by page and form by form then tests bounce rates and clicks on each segment before arriving at a conclusion on the efficacy of the testing. That’s one thought output that Oli Gardener from Unbounce puts out.

Again, if you go for the redesign it will depend upon the factors that will be unique to your website in many ways. Your segmentation, your output and your traffic numbers will vary across different timelines and audiences so as a client it is very important to know when the testing has hit its maxim.

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