Read the full story here, as reproduced in the Journal’s blog on lobbying and advocacy, Under the Influence.

And some subscribe quite often. The article states 55% of email subscribers in North America unsubscribe occasionally and 14% frequently. Again, another high number.

We as an email solutions provider are tossing these numbers at you for a few reasons, all of which involve improving your email marketing results. Lessons to remember here are:

• Your email marketing content must be relevant to the subscriber. Most unsubscribes are due to irrelevant email marketing content
• Your email marketing must show up in people’s inboxes with a frequency that works for them, not you. Email too often, and they’ll unsubscribe. Email too rarely, and they’ll forget the subscribed in the first place
• Your email marketing must pass the “annoyance” test so you don’t get reported as spam. Many people will report an email as spam rather than unsubscribe when they think your email marketing is irrelevant, too frequent, or both
• Your email marketing must remind people that they did subscribe and asked to hear from you. Use welcome emails to do this, and include a brief line in each email reminding them they subscribed

Also note that these numbers are for permission-based email marketing, meaning these folks subscribed to the emails in the first place.

Last month we offered a dozen practical ways to grow your in-house email list. This month, we’ll share one of our favorite campaigns with you. But then we want you to come up with a few other interesting ways and either post them as comments here or email them to us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com. We’ll share them in this email marketing blog.

This favorite example was spotted last spring by a friendly freelance email copywriter. Tully’s Coffee and Pemco Insurance teamed up for a fun campaign that also raised money for charity and collected email addresses to boot. All they did was offer small pieces of paper where people could write extremely long, fictional coffee orders. You, as the consumer, got your name entered into a drawing. Tully’s got the goodwill created when you laughingly made up your order. Pemco got the goodwill created when they donated money to charity…and somebody collected email addresses, because each slip of paper offered a place to enter your email address at the bottom.

You can read more about the campaign by clicking here.

Then send us your clever, out-of-the-box ideas for growing your in-house email marketing list!

It’s permission-based email marketing – meaning you got their permission, and your subscribers trusted you enough to hand over their email addresses in the first place. And you as the email marketer must guard that relationship when others in your company want to take advantage of the fast and cheap nature of email marketing for a quick financial fix.

To differentiate it from the Privacy Policy that reassures your subscribers you won’t share their email address, this policy is one that ensures you’ll treat your subscribers with respect. That means:

• Only sending them relevant emails
• Not over-messaging them (i.e. emailing them more often than they want)
• Providing them with a profile page where they can change and specify what they want to hear about and how
• Segmenting and targeting your email marketing

You as the email marketer might be adhering to these email marketing best practices already, but the above policy will ensure that the rest of your company does to. So your subscribers will continue to want to hear from you and your emails will continue to be welcome in their inboxes. And that can only help your email marketing ROI.

Wrong. Hence the whitepaper. And they make a great point that is easily lost in the world of email marketing. We hear a lot about targeted and one-to-one marketing, yet plenty of companies are still doing batch and blast.

Maybe because it’s email they think it’s “direct” marketing, but really it’s just mass marketing. It’s no different than mailing your promotional postcard to 100,000 recipients who may or may not be your target market. And what’s a typical response rate to a direct mail campaign? A measly 1 ½ %. That’s because that’s mass marketing too, just like TV and radio ads.

As the whitepaper states, “…the more experienced email marketers realize that a far more effective way may be to email to a smaller list of individuals who have actually expressed a desire to hear from you. Why? Because when you market to people who have told you expressly that they want to hear from you, you can expect to see these results.”

Email marketing isn’t about quantity, although technology makes it easy to think that way. Like all marketing, it’s about getting results. And email is also a great way to build and reinforce relationships too, when done directly.

Get the whitepaper here.