A certain level of Unsubscribed contacts is expected in every email list
The average marketing list loses a third of email subscribers in the first month after they sign up, and almost half in their first year.
Nationally Organise has around 15% of our all-time contacts unsubscribed, and at our current rate we lose less than 1% a year (which is more than compensated by new supporters joining). This is what many standard marketing email lists would expect to lose with a single email.
Our average open-rate is also close to 50%, again significantly higher engagement than standard marketing emails which would expect 10-20%.
There are many ways of being a member and supporter of the party, and we should not expect everyone in Organise to continue to be actively engaged in our campaigns over many years.
Members may pay their dues every month as a contribution to our election efforts or to have a vote in selections, but not be interested in the local party outside of these times.
Supporters may have come to a specific event they are interested in, but not want an ongoing relationship with our campaigns.
The best way to deal with Unsubscribes is by preventing them in the first place, by sending short, high-quality emails to a limited audience of people that these emails are most relevant to. Supporters decide on their preferences with us as an organisation rather than individual email authors, so its good for everyone in the party if we all write better emails. See more in our guide on Writing Effective Emails
Unsubscribes should be assumed to be legitimate unless the person has explicitly told you otherwise
As a party, we are under a legal obligation to respect supporter’s communication preferences. If our systems have recorded that someone does not want to receive emails, we must always honour that.
We cannot send them an email from outside of Organise to get around the limits that the system rightly puts in place.
We are not allowed to change their communication preferences in Organise just because we believe it was probably a mistake (for instance if this person was a long-time engaged member), if we have not heard that directly from them.
It is possible for someone to be Unsubscribed without intending to be
While most unsubscribes are intentional, there are circumstances where someone does not know why they are not receiving local party emails. Members can always log in to Labour Hub to check their status for themselves and get instructions on how to fix it.
The cause for unintended unsubscribes tends to be one of two reasons:
- The supporter received a certain email from Organise that wasn’t relevant to them (e.g. an invite to a regional fundraising dinner far away), but did not realise they were unsubscribing from all local Labour emails and not just a single email list. We are making improvements to our unsubscribe process to make this clearer to them at the time and push them towards using the more specific preferences so they can still get the emails they care about.
- The supporter has forwarded an Organise email on to someone else, and that person has then clicked the unsubscribe link not realising that these links are unique to the email address the message was originally sent to. This is often the case if Organise users ever find themselves unsubscribed, as usually they have forwarded one of their own emails on to a person or people who didn’t receive it via Organise, who then accidentally unsubscribed this user. This shows the importance of sending out all your emails through Organise where supporters are given the proper tools to manage their own preferences and where these unsubscribe links are not accessible to anyone else.
We can never contact people by email if they have unsubscribed, but if they are still subscribed to other contact methods you can reach out to them
As mentioned above, we cannot bypass someone’s stated preferences not to receive emails, even as a “one-off” to check that they really intended to unsubscribe.
However if they have not changed their other preferences, they may still be available to call, text, or send paper mail, either to check why they unsubscribed and receive useful feedback on our emails, or give them advice on how to resubscribe if they would like to.
We have also included a new “Resubscribe SMS” button in Organise if they are still subscribed to texts so you can easily send an automated text to someone with a link to resubscribe.
Contacting someone directly like this should be rare – no supporter should be repeatedly contacted to try and get them to resubscribe to emails if they’ve told you they really did intend to unsubscribe.
There are multiple ways to Unsubscribe, some we’re able to change on behalf of a supporter, some we aren’t
The ideal way for a supporter to unsubscribe is to do so on their communication preferences page in Labour Hub – links to that page are included inside the footer at the bottom of every Organise email.
Here they can tell us if they are happy to still receive communication from other parts of the party (e.g. their local party, but not their region), and they can remove themselves from specific contact lists that they do not want to be included on.
If someone has set their preferences in this way we can see this on their record in Organise, and if they have said they want to receive certain emails again, we can change it for them.
Organise uses a bulk email provider, Elastic Email, to send out over 30 million individual emails to supporters each year. It is important for this company to maintain a positive reputation as a sender of legitimate, non-spammy emails, in order to prevent emails from all of their organisational clients getting sent to Junk folders.
To do this, they enforce that every email going through their system must include their service’s own unsubscribe link. This is the “Manage Notifications” or "Unsubscribe" link that sits below the footer on every Organise email.
Some email services also offer a built-in one-click unsubscribe feature which will also send the message direct to our email provider.
If the person has unsubscribed with our email provider, then we are not able to overwrite this on their behalf. They will need to enter their email address into a separate web form managed by our provider and receive an email to confirm they want to undo this change and rejoin the list. We’ve made this as easy as possible for them to do if they go to labour.org.uk/resubscribe
To identify which method someone has used to unsubscribe, look for the following signs in Organise:
- If someone has changed their communication preferences in Labour Hub, any emails to them will be blocked at the “Audience report” stage by Organise when looking at the results of that email, and on their individual record you will see some of their emails preferences toggled to Off
- If someone has unsubscribed with our email provider, any emails to them will be blocked at the “Delivery report” stage with an error message (usually Unsubscribed or Complaint), and on their record you will see a red banner next to their communication preferences saying they are unsubscribed with our provider and will need to resubscribe themselves
For necessary constitutional emails, we will email all the unsubscribed people we are able to
The party is allowed to contact members with important information about their contractual relationship with us. This includes their rights to have a say in processes like candidate selections, NEC elections, and leadership elections, as laid out in the rulebook.
If you want to contact members who have unsubscribed from regular emails about one of these constitutional processes, you can select “Constitutional Email” when writing a new email and it will bypass the usual filters for communication preferences.
Use of this option is monitored, and misuse to send emails which don’t fall in this category will lead to your Organise access being revoked as well as a further investigation. If you are unsure whether an email is constitutional please get in touch with the Organise team or your regional office.
Unfortunately if a member is unsubscribed with our email provider, this will usually block constitutional emails as well.