You Want Unsubscribes

While not necessarily a useful metric, the success or efficacy of owned media channels is typically judged by how many subscribers they have.

Seeing that a newsletter has thousands of subscribers is impressive - especially if you’re familiar with the challenge of building your own list.

But an owned media channel that retains everyone who has ever signed up for it is not an effective one.

Even if it’s important and meaningful to you, your owned media channel is not your business. It’s a marketing mechanism to build credibility and trust with your ideal customers so that when they have the problem you can help them with, they’ll become clients.

Eventually, someone is going to unsubscribe.

But that’s something you actually want.

A positive signal of efficacy.

Typically, unsubscribes are viewed through the lens of a scarcity mindset: you’ve worked so hard to attract readers in the first place, and when they opt out, there’s a compulsion to want to analyze why.

Was there a specific topic you covered that wasn’t valuable?

Was it how you communicated something?

Does that person just not like you anymore?

But - provided that you’ve properly set expectations about how frequently you’ll be sending - what’s far more likely is that their circumstances changed.

Maybe you provided them with the information that they needed to overcome the problem they were facing.

Maybe they only signed up to get the resource you offered as an incentive (a practice you may wish to consider stopping).

Maybe that problem is no longer as pressing or relevant to them, and since there’s no reason to continue learning about it, they’re self-selecting out.

And, since their rationale for unsubscribing only needs to make sense to them, you shouldn’t unsubscribe people yourself based on their level of activity.

It’s easy to frame unsubscribes negatively, because they create the perception of a loss of momentum.

But it’s not as though they’re irreversible - someone can always sign back up.

Alternatively, if you host your material on your website, it might simply be more convenient to access there.

Regardless of the mechanism, the goal is the same - to be helpful.