Reducing Opt-Outs

By Prisma Campaigns
December 13, 2023

Today’s most successful marketing campaigns all rely on multiple channels to get the word out. Businesses take advantage of email, SMS, and online advertising to ensure that their audience is receiving the message. However, many of these channels require the recipient to agree to receive more material and allow them to “opt out” of any future messaging. Reducing the frequency of these opt-outs is essential to the continued success of your marketing campaigns, but what can you do to help ensure that happens?

Limiting opt-outs from your messaging pool requires knowledge and careful planning of every step of the engagement process. In this article, we’ll go over the five most important details that every messaging campaign should include to reduce the number of opt-outs and increase the campaign’s effectiveness.

Allow Your Audience to Set Preferences

A strategy that many businesses have found successful in reducing opt-outs is allowing the audience to set their own messaging preferences. This can include which channels they would like to use, how frequently they would like to receive messages, and even which products and services they’d like to hear about. When audience members are allowed to establish the boundaries of contact, they are much more likely to engage with the material sent their way, and much less likely to opt out.

This can actually help financial institutions narrow down the segments that your members belong to, and prevent you from sending unhelpful or irrelevant information their way. For example, say a new member is a recent college graduate who hates getting extra text messages. If you do not allow them to establish their preferences, that audience member may get SMS marketing material regarding new offers on home loans, causing them to opt out of messaging entirely. This can damage the member’s trust in you, and more importantly, cause them to miss out on material that does interest them.

Identify the Correct Frequency

Timing is everything. Catching your target audience at the correct time and place can be the difference between a conversion and an opt-out.

So how do you establish the correct pace for campaign messaging? For most businesses, the pace should be about every two weeks. This seems to be a good middle ground, slow enough not to be confused with spam, but frequent enough to keep an audience's attention.

Each financial institution’s audience will vary in how frequently they’d like to receive communication. This could be an option that members choose for themselves as a part of their preferences but can also be learned by taking a closer look at your data. Statistics like click rates can be very valuable markers of how efficient and informative your messaging truly is, so make sure you always add some clickable call-to-actions in your communications.

Get Personal

Personalization can help prevent your messaging from blending into the crowd. The last thing you want is for your carefully researched, expertly crafted marketing materials to go to waste because an audience member thinks it’s spam.

This doesn’t mean that you should be messaging audience members like they’re a friend, or that you need to be intimately familiar with their personal lives. Sometimes, simply addressing the audience member by their name can help keep them engaged. The language you use is also important. Check out this other article about Marketing Language for Credit Unions.

Taking the time to properly segment your audience can help as well. A member who has expressed interest in buying a car can be pleasantly surprised by a message that says, “Hey, the last time we spoke, you were looking at cars. Have you bought one yet? If not, we offer great rates on auto loans!” This level of personalization requires a bit more care but can provide great results once implemented.

Optimize for All Platforms

Consider how many different ways you interact with businesses on a daily basis. You’ll likely receive marketing material through your phone, on your computer, through websites, on television or radio, and in person. There are hundreds of ways to get your message to an audience member, but if it isn’t optimized for the platform they’re on, it will often be ignored. If you’ve ever received an email that wasn’t optimized for mobile, you know how frustrating the experience can be.

When it comes to reducing opt-outs, this may be the most impactful tip of all. Ensuring that your material is optimized for all channels, especially mobile, will help tremendously when it comes to retaining your audience.

Leave the Door Open

It’s important to keep in mind that these strategies won’t always work. Some audience members simply don’t have room in their inbox for your marketing emails and would prefer not to receive them. Some have already got what they wanted, and don’t want to feel as if they’re being pressured into something else.

It’s important (and legally required) to let these audience members opt out, but equally important to leave the door open for them to return. Making the process of rejoining the audience frictionless can help you recapture members who have chosen to opt out of your campaign. If their contact information and preferences remain intact, it will allow you to easily fit them back into your existing audience and make the process more enjoyable for them as well.

Central to all these strategies is putting yourself in the position of your audience. Anything that you’d find annoying or off-putting is likely to make your audience feel the same way and could cause them to opt out.

Connect with Prisma Campaigns to learn more.

About Prisma Campaigns

Prisma Campaigns is a marketing automation platform specifically designed to help credit unions develop deep and empathic relationships with their members through personalized marketing campaigns. It uses a connected, data-centric approach to communicate with members on all your digital channels - email, SMS, online banking and mobile app. Prisma Campaigns’ open platform integrates with your existing banking technology and is ready to grow and expand with your credit union.

Prisma is trusted by 25 credit unions to enhance their member experience and increase conversion rates.