Follow these strategies for controlling unsubscribes and bouncebacks, and you'll see a difference in your bottom line.

Your marketing efforts for acquiring customers can come with a hefty price tag. Since it is considerably cheaper to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new one, ensuring that you are carefully monitoring email churn can help reduce the financial impact of keeping and acquiring customers.

Email churn or "customer database churn" can be broken down into two categories, voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary churn is defined as the action of a customer actively unsubscribing from your email communications. Involuntary churn is generally attributed to customers who have changed email addresses and their contact email addresses are no longer valid.

Monitoring the effect
Your churn rate, as applied to your email customer base, is the percentage of customers (active email subscribers in your database) who opt out or become undeliverable during a given time period. This can be a possible indicator of customer dissatisfaction, over-communicating (frequency), email complaints (recipients clicking "this message is SPAM" within their email provider), bad or bounced emails, more "rich" offers or more successful marketing from competitors, or simply any reasons having to do with the lifecycle of your customers.

Helping to reduce churn
You can help minimize voluntary churn by incorporating basic strategies to encourage customers to remain engaged with your organization.

• Establish loyalty programs that reward and incent current and future customers to remain active in your email messaging programs.
• Create customer acquisition programs that offer a "bonus" for enrolling in a specific or multiple campaign series. Tie the offer or bonus to a minimum commitment period for the recipient to receive your messages. This will alleviate the problem of people opting in for the bonus only to rapidly opt out.
• Offer alternatives during the unsubscribe process, which is a very easy method to retain customers. A simple line or two of well-written copy reiterating the advantages of receiving your messages before they click to unsubscribe may prevent a possible opt out.
• Use your unsubscribe page to enable email recipients to reduce the frequency of their messaging. Often times, recipients perceive that they are receiving too many messages from your organization. Remember, your email message is competing in an inbox that is most likely full of similar offers from competitors.
• Use your unsubscribe page to function as a survey tool to find out why customers are opting out of your messaging. Incorporating a brief exit survey with the following questions can help identify customer-perceived issues with your communications and will help you modify your messaging to avoid common email pitfalls: "Do you feel that you receive too many messages from our company?" "Do you feel that the messages we send to you are relevant?" "Are other companies providing better offers/deals than our organization?"
• Test messaging frequency to obtain the optimal number of messages your customers are willing to receive. Monitoring your testing frequency and churn helps to identify the sweet-spot for the appropriate number of messages that you are sending to your customers.
• Use a remarketing filter to limit the number of email messages being sent. If you segment your database, you should avoid sending multiple messages to the same recipient on a weekly basis. Pick the most relevant messages based on the consumer's preferences and segmentation of your database.
• Closely monitor your competitors and the offers they are promoting to customers to ensure that your marketing messages are in line with current industry offers -- this can also help reduce voluntary churn.

You can help negate involuntary churn by utilizing some of the following suggestions and practices.

• Provide not only a customer profile page that can be easily accessed via your website for customers to update their email and preferences, but also include a link in all of your email communications that directs your customers back to their profile pages for simple and efficient profile management.
• During the enrollment period of your acquisition process, ask for an alternate email address. This can reduce involuntary churn by allowing you to revert to the second contact address if the first email address bounces or becomes inactive. This is helpful when you are sending messages to corporate email accounts where an individual may not update his email address if he leaves his current place of employment.
• Include Whitelisting information -- "add to address book/add as safe sender" -- in all of your email communications. The deliverability landscape is always changing, and what may be delivered to an inbox one day could end up in a bulk folder the next. Recipients often times tag all messages in bulk or spam folders and simply report these messages as spam without closely reviewing the sender and subject line.

Summary
Database churn is inevitable and should be considered a part of a healthy equation to your email marketing strategy. Churn, when monitored closely, ensures that you are keeping your database clean and inherently maintains your database with those individuals who want to continue receiving your messages.

Christopher Lovejoy is account executive, strategic services, Premiere Global Services, eMarketing Solutions.