Email Marketing Tips - Unsubscribing Best Practices

Unsubscribing Best Practices

We'd like to focus this month on unsubscribing practices. The visibility and accessibility of the unsubscribe process are obvious considerations; but the speed at which an unsubscribe is processed may not be as obvious, and it’s a vital component to effective list management.

It may not be obvious because we're all accustomed to thinking from our own point of view. But if we were to take the customer's point of view for a moment, we'd see the value in a quick unsubscribe. Here's the scenario: you decide that you no longer want to be on a given list. Maybe you haven't bought anything from that vendor for a few months. Maybe you subscribed by accident (it happens). In any case, thank you, no, I’m just not interested right now. You unsubscribe.

The following week, you receive another email offer. Perhaps even two. Now you've gone from feeling neutral about the company sending the emails to feeling irritated about it. The Net is supposed to be fast, right? So why didn't they get the message?

Even looking at it from the company's point of view speaks to the wisdom of a quick unsubscribe. Do you really want people on your lists who don't want to be there? You really want to make people feel irritated when they think about you? Of course not. A quick unsubscribe mechanism is the best way to keep everybody happy, and your lists error-free.