By Tom Wozniak, Chief Operating Officer – published on OnlyInfluencers on 4/26/24

Back in 2021, I wrote an article for Only Influencers sharing data from OPTIZMO’s annual Email Opt-Out Infographic. That infographic covered data from 2018-2020, so it culminated with a look at how a year of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced email opt-out behavior. (Is it just me or is it hard to remember exactly what year the pandemic happened? Part of my brain has put it far behind us, but in reality, it was officially declared to be over less than 2 years ago.) While we’ve continued publishing our annual infographics each year, I hadn’t written about what those post-pandemic years showed. So, did email recipient behavior return to pre-pandemic ‘normal’ or were some of the changes more long-lasting? Let’s take a look.

Before we dive in, some email marketers may wonder – why focus on negative marketing signals like opt-outs? “These are people who I can’t market to anymore, so I just want to get them off my list and move on.” It’s a natural thought process, but I think it needs to be reassessed. When we are evaluating campaigns and working on ways to optimize performance, we typically focus on our KPIs like open rate (maybe not so much anymore), click rate, conversions/sales, revenue, etc. These are the metrics we’re trying to improve, so that’s where we tend to focus first. However, all of our negative marketing metrics (opt-outs, spam complaints, non-responders, etc.) are equally as important to analyze. Sometimes the best way to improve response is to understand why some recipients either ignore your emails or don’t want to receive them. Learning about what is turning some people off can be every bit as valuable as knowing what gets others to engage. If that concept sounds interesting, I’ll be speaking about the value of negative marketing signals to optimize your email campaigns during Email Innovations World in June (save 15% on registration with code ‘ONLYINFLUENCERS’)!

When we analyze the hundreds of millions of opt-out requests we process each year, we tend to look at them in a few categories.

• WHERE opt-outs are coming from (Geography and Email Domain)
• WHEN opt-outs are received (Month, Weekday, and Time of Day)
• WHAT technology was involved with those opt-outs (Device Type, Browser, Operating System)

Quick note – our latest infographic comes out in a few weeks, so all this data is a bit of a sneak peek.

Read the rest at OnlyInfluencers

Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications as the COO for OPTIZMO Technologies.