Give Power To Your Users

Sorry, what? Yes, that's right.

Control is something we all favour. We plan ahead, we prefer to do things ourselves, we make decisions.

Since control is essential to human beings, you should consider giving control to your users or at least make them feel like they have control over how they use your products.

It starts with letting the user decide when to receive messages. That is an easy example and more or less easy to implement.

"In order to achieve the outcome that is wanted or expected, different behaviours are used in different circumstances. Using different means to achieve anticipated outcomes is the hallmark of control. Control is the process of living."*

Subscribe Or Not Subscribe

With a notification centre. When you think about unsubscribing from an email newsletter, let's say you got it too often, you click on the unsubscribe link and end up in a notification centre.

You actually like the content of the newsletter but you don't have the time to read it as often as you get it. Now, the notification centre offers you to still get the content but less frequently.

You even have the possibility to unsubscribe from categories. Are you still thinking about unsubscribing from the newsletter? Or would you give it a try and change the settings to maybe once a week and/ or deselect some category?

At this point, you, as a user, are in power of decision making. For a CRM Manager, this is a great opportunity to keep users who wanted to unsubscribe from your service. If they would, you would not be able to reach them anymore via email. Not only the frequency but also the categories should be in a notification centre. The optimal solution would be to also add other channels like push notifications.

Reminders

Many apps use reminders, mainly in the form of push notifications. They remind you of your workout you should do, the birthday present you wanted to buy, the train delay and I am sure you can come up with tons of other reminders. Also here it is possible to give the user more than one option. Schedules and routines differ for every single user. That's how your product has to be, as individual as possible. Give your users the power to choose the day and time of a reminder and also the possibility to change them whenever it needs to be changed. You will avoid uninstalls and complete opt-out of pushes.

A Second Chance

After annoying your users, you will hardly get a second chance to make it better. That should be kept in mind. If a user unsubscribed or has never signed up for your marketing communications, use the channels you have to advertise your content and also the benefits of a subscription, for example in a newsfeed/inbox. Add a card that explains the benefits of signing up and get newsletter opt-ins through your newsfeed.

If you added the notification centre later to your product, give a little feature update on your product so everyone knows there is a possibility of a little control.

Let Them Go

One last thing: Not all unsubscribes are bad. If a user is really not interested in your content anymore, fine. It is better they unsubscribe, which keeps your list clean, than having emails which are not opened or clicked anymore. Long term this goes down to your IP reputation and your overall KPI performance.

*Seen on psychology today