Unsubscribed Leads: Pay or Delete?

I began to receive an extra monthly invoice from my email marketing software provider, Aweber. It was a $9.95 extra charge per month for going over my allotted subscribers for my plan.

The numbers didn’t jive with what I had for subscribers to my mailing lists so I asked Aweber about it. They got back to me right away (another reason I dig Aweber, great support) and they mentioned that if you include the list members that have unsubscribed to my mailing list, I was over the allotted amount of subscribers for my account.

Aweber informed that I could delete the unsubscribed email addresses but they provided reasons why I might want to keep them on my account:

This stored information can be useful to see what subscribers like/dislike
about your messages. You can also see when they unsubscribed to see if there
are any correlations between your message content and their position in your
message sequence. You can use this to determine if subscribers are stopping
on a certain message or after a certain period of time.

If you have prospect and customer lists, you may want to track those
subscribers who were once prospects and then became customers, as well as
when the transition occurred. If those subscribers weren’t being counted
toward your subscriber totals, we would simply remove that information and
there would be no way to track when someone became a customer and if/when
they were a prospect, in addition to which message persuaded them to make a
purchase.

It didn’t sound too bad and it made sense, they are storing that data so it should count, but is it worth the extra ten bucks per month? After four months, I decided, it’s not worth it.

Here is why. The simple fact is that I don’t anything with that data, so what’s the point of paying for it? I could be doing more testing to figure out why people are unsubscribing, but when they do provide feedback it’s usually something along the lines of “I get too many emails already“.

I try to email about once a week, but in reality, I average an email every 2-3 weeks which is very low for the email marketing world. So it’s not that I’m emailing them too much (I’m actually emailing too infrequently when it comes to email marketing), but when you add me to the other email lists they subscribed, it’s just too many emails.

I don’t see how crunching my unsubscribe data will help me improve those numbers, so why pay an additional ten bucks per month to store data from folks who didn’t want to stay subscribed to my list anyway? Folks who will never again see one of my emails.

So I deleted them off my Aweber account. However, before I erased them into oblivion, I did download my list (unsubscribed peeps too) so I have them all saved onto a spreadsheet on my computer. It’s good backup and I’ll still have that unsubscriber data, I just won’t be paying Aweber extra for it, every month.

By the way, backing up your mailing list onto your computer from time to time is always a good idea. You just never know what might happend  with your email marketing software so it’s best to keep that valuable asset backed up on your own computer for safe keeping.

Here is how to do that with Aweber (it’s easy peasy)…