[Email Hack] Reduce Churn with a Subscriber Snooze Button

Ever wished your email subscribers could take a break without hitting that dreaded unsubscribe button?

I've got just the hack for you! In this episode of Unbox the Inbox, I'm sharing a game-changing strategy we embraced at BusterBox to combat email list churn. Imagine a snooze button—not for your morning alarm, but for your email list.

This innovative feature gives subscribers the freedom to pause emails for two or four weeks, keeping them connected without overwhelming their inbox. You'll learn how to implement this flexible approach using ActiveCampaign, complete with step-by-step automation instructions to seamlessly manage subscriber preferences.

Join me, Gary Redmond, as I guide you through creating dedicated snooze pages and the automation magic behind applying tags to subscriber profiles. This strategy isn't just about reducing unsubscribe rates; it's about nurturing long-term relationships with your audience while ensuring they receive emails on their terms. 

Whether you're a subscription business veteran or just starting, this clever tweak is bound to enhance your email marketing efforts. Tune in to discover how this approach has transformed our strategy at BusterBox and how it can make a significant difference for your business too!

• Please suggest any topic you would like me to cover by visiting unboxtheinbox.com
• Join my newsletter at garyredmond.com/newsletter

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your subscription business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. Okay, so today's episode relatively short one I wanted to teach you about a new hack that we've started to use in our business in BusterBox, and it's starting to actually really help with our unsubscribe rate. Okay Now, we're not really too concerned about unsubscribe rates in general certainly a lot, a lot less than maybe some, some other businesses. While I know it's an important metric and you certainly don't want to have a lot of list churn, you can avoid it. We're also kind of of the opinion that we really only have one product to sell with our subscription box, so it's kind of like we kind of have a bit of a binary way of looking at it and that is like if they're going to buy it, then they're going to buy it. If they're not going to buy it, they can unsubscribe or they will unsubscribe. So we're not too concerned about it, but so we're not too concerned about it. But we have recently started to pay a little bit more attention to our list churn and how come up with ways of trying to reduce it, and one of the ways that I came across was to introduce a snooze button no-transcript, and one of them says snooze two weeks and the other one says snooze four weeks. Okay, and what you can do is you can actually in our email builder we use active campaign. You can save these blocks so you can kind of save it as a global block, so you don't have to keep recreating the buttons and putting in the links and stuff. So what we've done now is at the bottom of every email from buster box we have would you like to take a break from our emails? So this is designed to. Instead of have people unsubscribe if they don't want to hear from you for a certain amount of time and then they never come back, they can just take a break. Maybe they just don't want to hear from you for now, or they've done their buying for you from you for most like for christmas, we think, maybe, or whatever. So the goal is to have people snooze themselves and then come back after two and two or four weeks and start to receive our emails again.

Speaker 1: 2:14

Okay, so, um, we implemented this and the way we implement this, the way to kind of finish the setup, is you create the buttons, and what you have to do is you need to link the snooze two weeks button, and what we essentially did was we fired up another page on our website and it's just busterboxcom forward slash snooze two weeks, and it's a simple website that comes up, white background. It says you have snoozed buster box emails for two weeks and the same with the four weeks one. You have snooze buster box emails for four weeks and that's at busterboxcom forward slash snooze four weeks. So we have two well, two buttons and two corresponding website links, and the way to basically make it work is to create an automation that says when someone visits either busterboxcom forward slash snooze two weeks, and we're going to apply a tag to them in active campaign that says snooze two weeks. When someone visits busterboxcom forward slash snooze four weeks, we're going to apply a tag to them in active campaign called snooze four weeks. So when these tags are applied to these customers contact profiles, what we'll do is the next time we're sending an email, we'll basically only send it to people who are not tagged as snooze two weeks or snooze four weeks, and that way the people who have decided to snooze themselves will be excluded from all of our emails, our marketing emails, going forward until basically two weeks or four weeks has passed, until basically two weeks or four weeks has passed. So the way to remove the tag then is to create another action or another automation that basically says that's triggered when the tag is applied to their profile. That says you know this person has. When someone has basically been tagged snooze two weeks, wait two weeks and remove the tag. When someone has been tagged snooze four weeks, wait four weeks and remove the tag, and that way the tag will be added when they click the link and visit the website and it will be removed after the period of time that they want it to be snoozed for, and then it will start to receive the emails again.

Speaker 1: 4:09

Now one thing to be aware of is, depending on whether you have site tracking set up on your ActiveCampaign account or if you're using a different email provider, you want to just verify that your snooze buttons are working okay. So when you send an email about it, you want to check if anybody clicked the links and just double check in their profiles whether the actually tag was applied. Because we had an issue where we sent a couple of emails with the snooze buttons but for some reason people were visiting the URLs but they weren't being tracked in ActiveCampaign. So what we ended up having to do was to change the trigger to be when someone clicks on the link in that email, they will be tagged. So the reason why that's a little bit more complicated is you need to remember to do that every time through ActiveCampaign, whereas if the site tagging was working correctly, I'm going to contact the support, but we've had problems with this before.

Speaker 1: 4:58

But basically, if the site tracking is working, it should track the person when they visit that website from any email that you sent, okay, whereas if it's not working, you have to do it where the tag is applied, when they click the link in that email. But you have to continually set that as an action with each email you send. So that's what we're going to do for now to see how many people are actually snoozing themselves and see how effective it is, although it has shown some potential right now, and if it works, we can try and make sure that the sidetracking is working correctly. Okay, maybe that's not too valuable, but it's just an important thing to know if you are using ActiveCampaign to just double check that your tags are being applied. So that's it for today.

Speaker 1: 5:39

I just wanted to give you that little email hack to reduce your unsubscribes and basically keep people on your email list, even if you email quite regularly. Okay, because we're at the point where we're emailing very regularly and people, to be honest, maybe are not interesting in hearing from us for a certain amount of time. So this is a way for them to snooze themselves without having to cancel their or unsubscribe from the list totally. So I hope that episode was helpful. If you have any questions for me or any topics you'd like me to cover, feel free to email me at gary at garyredmannet, or you can find me in the Subscription Box. Success Facebook group.