You go to bed, wake up and find you have new ezine subscribers. It's a wonderful feeling (almost as good as waking up to find you've sold some products).



Then comes the day when you put your heart and soul into your newsletter article, hit SEND and get a notice indicating that someone's unsubscribed.

The most common question I hear from my clients is "What did I do wrong?" immediately followed by "Maybe I should stop publishing my newsletter since no one likes it."

In learning how to handle your newsletter unsubscribes, you must first realize:

1. Typically, you did nothing wrong.

2. There IS a silent majority of your newsletter readers who learn from you and enjoy your newsletters, but may not speak up to tell you.

3. Chances are, those who unsubscribe are not your ideal client and would just be inflating your list by staying on it - remember, it's the quality of your list, not the size that really matters.

That said, it can still hurt, especially when you give it your all.

Now that we've addressed your emotional response to unsubscribes, let's talk about what you should do when you they occur:

1. Have the email with unsubscribe notifications go to someone, anyone, besides you. Even if this needs to be a fictional person at an email account you check every-so-often.

2. Know your unsubscribe percentage (calculate this by taking the number of unsubscribes for a given period, dividing it by your total subscribers and multiplying by 100) and continue to monitor it. If is rises significantly, take a look at how long your unsubscribes had been with you, where they came from and whether or not you significantly changed your usual ezine format/style of writing or started offering more promotions.

3. If you are using more than one system (a shopping cart and an ezine system like Constant Contact for example), ensure that the person is marked as "do not mail" for each and every system to avoid complaints down the road.

Unsubscribes are a natural part of your business - just as clients come and go, so do newsletter subscribers. The important thing is to know your average number of unsubscribes and act/adjust if the number unexpectedly increases.

Your Coaching Challenge

Create a process for handling your unsubscribes and ensure you are looking at the percentage at least once per month to be sure it's not increasing (and if it is, WHY is it?). If you notice an increase in your unsubscribe percentage and have taken the steps above to determine what's happening, create a survey (you can use www.SurveyMonkey.com for free) to ask your readers what you're doing right, what they'd like to see more of and what they'd like to see less of - remember, the more specific you are in your questions, the better responses you'll get and you can always offer a f'ree gift for your readers to complete the survey.