Blog Action Day Lost Me Subscribers – What To Do About Unsubscribes
So was Blog Action Day a success? I feel like it was. My post got a warm response and there was a lot of buzz around the intarwebs.
It seems though my comment about the topic getting folks hot under the collar was spot on. I had the worst day for unsubscribes ever!
I have FeedBurner email me whenever anyone unsubscribes. Every so often I will email and ask why people left. Up to now I have had stinker posts that send people away, but it is usually when people get tired of getting a daily email they leave me.
Yesterday I had double the previous record of unsubs. If you think email counts for around 40% to a half of my subscribers at any time this means I lost a shed load of people by talking about the environment.
While a good many will have dropped my feed because the post was off-topic (although I did try to make it relevant to blogging and memes) and I use a few people every day anyway, it seems as I got positive feedback in the comments, the subject matter of the post was responsible.
Should I worry? Is there something I can do to “fix” this?
No, I don’t think so.
- Success means some people will hate what you do
- One off-topic post in several hundred is not excessive
- They likely only want to read stuff that agrees with their world-view, not likely to find much of that here
- I will be taking part in the next Blog Action Day so they might as well leave now
The time to worry about unsubscribes is when you have an over all downward trend or you have no idea why people have left you. I am pretty sure I know the reason for this as I have been monitoring my unsubs for quite a while and thankfully my trend has been broadly upwards since I launched 🙂
My advice:
- Monitor your unsubscribes – Go to Feedburner and navigate Publicize/EMail Subscriptions then tick “Send me an email whenever people unsubscribe”
- Ask Why – Email people who unsubscribe and ask why they did. Half the time it will be nothing you did or you will have no control over it.
- Learn From Trends – You can’t please everyone all the time but if many people say the same thing there is probably something to learn from. Keep your subscriber count growing and experiment, learn from the positive and negative feedback.
How did Blog Action Day work out for you? Let me know in the comments …
