If you want to reduce them:

(1) make sure your content is important to the largest fraction of your audience

(1a) make sure each mailing contains at least something for all of your audience

(2) don't mail too frequently

(3) gracefully deal with unsubscribers, confirm that you have unsubscribed them on the page, do not send them more email

(4) really delete their email addresses, don't keep them around so you can mail them or sell them in the future

(5) make sure that your sign-up message matches the content of the thing that will be received

(6) of course, double opt-in every sign up to ensure that it is really the person subscribing and not some joe job.

(7) there will always be a fraction of your new subscribers that immediately unsubscribe after receiving the first email; this is called 'first contact churn' or some variation on that theme. This is perfectly normal and tends to be much higher than the churn from users longer in your system.

(8) Your list is as valuable as the engagement with your audience. People that do not engage with your content - whether you mail them or not - might as well not be in your system to begin with.

Unfortunately many large US businesses still do not do this (or verify email ownership when registering for something). Other people enter their first + last @gmail when signing up for things (I have a common name), but that doesn't mean they have a business relationship with me, so it's legally defined as spam.

I don't shed a tear when I mark it as spam.

At this point I’m fairly confident that the person cannot get into their account that uses my email address, but every few months I get an email that they’re trying to reset their password and I click the “this isn’t me” and Facebook says “sorry... nothing we can do”.

All because they don’t verify email addresses when someone signs up for an account.

1) 1% unsubscribe-per-mailing rate really isn't bad or unusual.

2) I doubt I would want a per episode email, BUT if I did suscribe to episode alerts, I might also be very surprised if they stopped coming. So you probably have a mixed population of core fans who want per-episode alerts and are surprised they're not getting them ~weekly, and a bigger group of casual interest who want to remember to look at your website to see if it stays interesting in the future, but who's ideal email frequency is more like once monthly.

That's probably ideally two lists, so ideally you need to split them. If you don't split them, I'd keep doing what they signed up for by default.

3) Keep your simple clear call to action on the web, BUT send messages with a not-next-to-unsubscribe slightly prominent "Hey, you signed up for per-episode alerts, click here if you'd like to be moved to a monthly 'episodes this month' alert instead"

That way the call to action on the web is kept simple (you know this call to action works, maybe don't mess with that), but people get used to there being an action between "do nothing and be annoyed" and "nuclear unsubscribe". This /might/ cut your per-episode-alert unsubscribe rate in half.

I would find this to be polite and considerate mailing behavior, and you in turn could feel free to stop worrying about sending your per-episode alerts.... and focus on a clean simple monthly summary message besides.

Or try to actually track it to see which is working. If you send every 3 episodes, do people watch all three? When you send a mail, do you see more eyeballs on the first, or more eyeballs on the more recent?

I guess the risk here is that you're getting 33% of the engagement to save 1% churn. Is 1\1000 worth more than 3\990?

IMO, an email per episode, when they're once a week, is just fine. Yes, your screencast and email notifications aren't for everyone, and that's what the unsubscribe button is for. Don't bother compromising on that in the hopes of winning back subscribers who just aren't really interested. Focus on the ones who do enjoy your content and do want to be notified when new episodes come out. Those are the people most likely to eventually pay something for your content. Those are the people you want to keep happy, not the people who are only tenuously interested at best.

I predict there will be grumpy people here suggesting a ton of elaborate things to do. IMO, don't bother. If you have a "unsubscribe" link that is easy to see and just works with no hassle, you've already done enough, and are better than 99% of the industry. Trying to set up extra less-frequent lists or things like that is a waste of time better spent on making good content.

Don't go around thinking like you'll have a "larger list" if you do something like what you've been doing. The opposite is infact true! The people you lose with more frequent emails (we're talking one a week here) were never interested in the first place, and just haven't bothered to actually unsubscribe yet. They may not unsubscribe with the less frequent emails, but they're almost certainly not viewing your content, and will never promote it to their friends. The people who love your content are the ones to worry about keeping happy. Those people may miss episodes they would have caught if they got the alerts, and every one they catch keeps them more engaged with your product and more likely to interact or share it with others.

Also it's reassuring to remember that the people I'm losing were probably never gonna be customers to begin with.

Naturally some people are going to go "meh, I'm not interested in this anymore" and hit unsubscribe. But those people presumably weren't engaging with your thing anyway, or else are engaging another way (for instance, seeing new ones on Twitter or something). So why worry about them unsubscribing?

This is assuming that people actively opted in, of course. If you're signing people up via them not clicking an opt-out checkbox or something, well, that's a different story, but also, stop doing it, it just annoys people.

Unless people are flagging you for spam, it’s just a lack of continued interest - which is expected and frankly useful, as it weeds out those that aren’t as engaged.

Laws and regulations are not code, especially in Europe, a "well technically" approach is not going to get you far

I noticed some correlation: the larger was the time since signup to receiving the first newsletter, the more people were likely to unsubscribe.

I'd say, send those newsletters, or your subscribers may forget about you.

I also worried about mailing too much, not mailing enough etc. and saw the same churn.

The way I thought about it is you want a group of CORE 1000 fans. So people that unsubscribe are not CORE, and they naturally fall off.

Open up to your community, have one-on-one conversations, and you'll get feedback on what makes sense for your audience.

Provide value and keep the feedback loop going, and don't worry too much about the natural churn.

My suggestion is to not take the rejection personally. There are so many reasons someone might unsubscribe, and none of them have to do with you personally... maybe they are too busy and any extra emails in the inbox adds to their stress, or maybe they are no longer interested in this topic, or maybe they were confused and thought the emails would be about something else, and so on... Why be offended or worried when someone unsubscribes for those reasons? Good, unsubscribe, I don’t want to bother you if you lost interest in this topic!

Think about the other 99% of people who WANT to hear from you, but you’re making them wait for the sake of a few people who shouldn’t be on your list anyway.

Thanks for the spiritual boost!

If you have an user base that stops liking your content then maybe other users will start liking it and subscribe?

Full disclosure I don't have much SEO experience and dislike the culture of selling people data and/or email addresses and/or optimizing for gathering more people.

I feel that if your content is good and you're happy posting new updates it will either attract people or not and attracting people shouldn't be the end goal you optimize for but rather good content.

EDIT: Also note that the subscribers you are losing for sending too many emails probably weren't watching anyways, which is why they unsubscribed. Value your real connections and don't worry about losing people who have already lost interest.

Is OP's screen cast website if anyone is looking for it.

The videos are high quality content but I really dislike the layout of his page.

It shows most recent videos and makes it semi difficult to find the First video in a series. I wish it had the some "start here" buttons at the top with the names of the different series.

Re: the layout on the home-page. Good point. I think I'll organize it in terms of linear "tracks" instead.

One suggestion: place the email and RSS subscription links in the area adjacent to the video. Perhaps not the whole "want to become a stronger programmer" message, since that would bury your description and show notes, but it the subscription options should be more prominent. The part about the RSS feed is particularly important since some people will not subscribe to any mailing list no matter how much you want them to subscribe to your list.

Otherwise I like your choice of content and mostly enjoy your presentation. Keep up the good work.

Each time I send a broadcast, I will go back 5 minutes later – see who's unsubscribed – and Google them because... I don't even know!

One thing I do now is schedule my broadcasts, instead of sending them "live". I will even schedule them to go out in 5 minutes' time – for some reason that's way easier than hitting send.

For a small list like this, it may mean separating users into two segments:

* Actively engaged, send them a weekly update

* Not engaged, only send them big new announcements.

Marketers tend to look at link clicks, email opens (measured via embedded images), and engagement with the actual product (if you have it) for segmentation like this.

Frankly I would rather that they unsubscribe versus filtering the newsletter to a folder where it never gets read.

You might consider a Discord server. Users can chat with each other, and you can post announcements.

Email is a terrific one-to-many communication tool for companies that have something useful to say and for people who want to hear it.

Give them the option of fewer emails at unsubscribe time. Perhaps they want a summary once a month. Offer them that if they ask to leave.

Either it is a legit list that unsubscribes or it's a scam. So who cares?

You are weeding out soft fans.