Why Hiding Your Unsubscribe Button is Doing More Harm Than Good
A lot of new businesses think that giving users a way to unsubscribe to emails will hurt their email performance and statistics. But does it? Here’s why you should always give your subscribers an easy way out.
You might be wondering, is email marketing still relevant? And the answer is — yes, it is. Not only has it been around for so long, but it’s also one of the best ways to create personal relationships with users and consumers.
A few years ago, people started predicting that email is dying. In 2015, John Brandon even predicted that email would be dead by 2020. But the truth is, email isn’t dead. People are just using it wrong.
For an email to be effective, it needs to be done right. The messaging, the promotions, and every other element in your email has to be chosen, written, and made according to your audience and what they want to see and read.
Because email is the most personal channel, consumers want to read emails written for them. Unfortunately, only 40% of consumers feel like they’re receiving personalized emails even though 90% of marketers think that they’re doing a good job. Most consumers aren’t interested in the contents of the emails they’re receiving.
That’s where marketing data comes in. If you get to know your audience better, your emails will perform better and help you grow.
In addition to impersonal content, too many emails received (from you and companies similar to yours) discourages consumers from opening any of them. For some companies, sending emails less frequently or at more targeted times works better than sending mass emails at any given moment.
The bottom line is, a lot of consumers and users still prefer to receive emails because they only receive emails from brands that they want to hear from. They signed up for those newsletters and genuinely want to receive news from those brands. As well, email can serve as the bridge between brands and consumers, making their relationship more friendly and personal rather than merely transactional.
Email Marketing Rules and Best Practices
Now that we’ve established the relevance of email marketing, what are some important things that we need to keep in mind?
First, there are rules to spam and using email for marketing purposes. Email service providers (ESPs) are strict about marketers sending too many, low-quality emails because having too many of them in the system slows down their servers.
Each country also has its own set of rules around email to protect the privacy of users and to prevent spam.
For example, all the people on your list should have clearly opted-in to receiving your messages. If you start emailing random people or buying email lists, then your email account will probably get marked as spammy by the ESP. Eventually, they might even block your account and ban your IP address from using their services.
This law also states that if your email is an ad, then that has to be clear. It’s up to you to decide how you’ll explicitly show that your email is an ad, but you can’t hide the fact.
And lastly, you need to include a physical address in your emails and provide a clear opt-out method.
Second, and in line with the rules stated above, there are things that you absolutely cannot do when it comes to sending emails:
1. Having an inaccurate subject line.
Misleading your consumers by using an exciting but inaccurate subject line might increase your open rates. But in exchange for that, you are probably hurting your click-through rates and damaging trust between your brand and your consumers.
Always be honest with your consumers. Write persuasive but honest subject lines to get people to open your emails. If they’re interested, everything will fall into place.
If you’re wondering what misleading subject lines look like, here’s a pretty comprehensive list by Bettina Specht that you can check out.
2. Emailing someone without their permission.
Every person on your mailing list has to have opted-in to it. This is why buying email lists is no longer an acceptable or profitable practice. When you email someone who hasn’t opted-in to your mailing list, you create two problems.
One, your email is automatically marked as spam. The receiver doesn’t know you and did not give you permission to email them. Being marked as spam by a lot of users will ruin your reputation with both your ESP and consumers.
Two, you can get fined. In the US, if you’re reaching out to random people individually and providing useful information to each person you email, then that’s fine. You would have to include an opt-out method in your email, but other than that, you won’t get fined for reaching out.
But if you’re bulk emailing a list of 200,000 people who have not consented to receiving emails from your firm, then you are risking getting fined.
A good case to look at is the case of Grove Pension Solutions Ltd, a pensions company from the UK. They we’re fined £40,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for sending emails to almost 2 million without consent.
So remember, always have proof that the people on your mailing list want to be on it. Some companies even recommend using the double-opt-in method to really make sure that your list is filled with interested people.
3. Not having a clear exit path.
Just as you need to have a clear opt-in method, you also need to have a clear opt-out method. After a user unsubscribes to your emails, you, as the company or marketer, have to honor that opt-out within 10 days or else you will most likely be violating spam laws in a lot of countries.
Many companies will place an unsubscribe button at the bottom of each email so that readers can opt-out by themselves. Other companies will place, “If you want to stop receiving our emails, reply to us with a ‘No.’” That is also perfectly fine.
Just remember, your readers need an easy and clear way to get off your mailing list. We’ll elaborate on this point in the rest of the article.
Here’s What Happens When You Don’t Give Your Consumers an Easy Way Out
So what exactly happens when you don’t have a clear opt-out method? Other than probably breaking certain spam laws, you’re also creating problems that could hurt your company in the long run.
First, you’re creating a terrible user experience.
Instead of ending your email relationship on a happy note, making it harder for your soon-to-be-ex-subscribers to get off your mailing list will only annoy them.
Do you remember how hard it was to cancel cable subscriptions because representatives were required to provide lists of promotions, ask a bunch of questions, and do other things that prolong the process? And do you remember how annoying that was?
It’s the same thing with long and draw-out email opt-outs. Your users get annoyed and could end up just marking your email as spam or blocking it entirely.
This frustration will also make retargeting impossible. Here’s an example to help prove this point.
Let’s stay that you have a subscriber named Jane. Jane loves baking, so she subscribed to the mailing lists of a bunch of baking tool retailers, including your business. After three months or so, she found that she was getting too much noise in her inbox, so she decides to unsubscribe to all the emails she had subscribed to.
If you let her go easily (probably with a quick exit survey), then you can try to retarget her through other marketing strategies from the information you gained. But if you give her a hard time, she will never want to be on your mailing list again.
Second, your list never gets cleaned.
Regularly cleaning your list is a good practice because you want your emails getting to people who are interested in them.
People unsubscribe for several reasons. Sometimes, it’s because they feel that the emails are irrelevant to them because of a lack of targeting. Other times, it’s because they had a bad experience with the company and no longer want to receive emails from them. But usually, it’s just because the email is no longer relevant.
For example, someone who just moved from one state to another would probably unsubscribe from emails that they were getting from local shops. Someone who changed jobs would want to stop getting emails related to their old job and start subscribing to emails related to their current job.
In the end, you want these people to unsubscribe. They probably won’t open your emails because the information is no longer relevant to them. They won’t click your links because they don’t need your product. Even if you keep these people on your list, they don’t add value to it.
Lastly, your reputation gets damaged.
When you fail to provide an easy way to opt-out of a mailing list, you run the risk of getting marked as spam by more than one account. Why would your audience go through the trouble of opting out when they can just mark your email as spam and be done with it?
And if your email gets marked as spam by enough accounts, then the ESP will put you on a blacklist. This means that any future emails sent by your account will automatically get placed in the spam folder.
So by not placing a clear opt-out option in your emails, you’re running the risk of hurting your campaign, not helping it. Adding that unsubscribe button can go a long way — especially if you use it to gather data.
Unsubscribes are Useful, not Hurtful
So now that you know what actually happens if you don’t place a clear opt-out method in your emails, here’s how you can make the best out of people who unsubscribe.
1. Learn more about your audience.
When your audience clicks that unsubscribe button, instead of just redirecting them to a confirmation page, ask them to answer a short survey.
By understanding the main reason why your subscribers unsubscribe, you can then create a retargeting plan and maybe get some of those users back on your list.
2. Get rid of the people who aren’t interested.
Some marketers believe that the bigger your lite, the better — but that just isn’t true anymore.
As has been mentioned before, people who want to opt-out probably won’t open your email anyway. And even if they do open the email, what are the chances that they’ll click your links or interact with your
If people want to unsubscribe — let them. That way, you only keep the people who want to be on your list. This will bring all your metrics up, from open rates to click-through rates.
3. Gather as much data as you can.
The first step is to understand who exactly is unsubscribing. By tracking not just how many people unsubscribe to your email but who exactly is unsubscribing, you can create a profile that details the reasons why people unsubscribe.
To help with that, you can create a more in-depth end-journey survey that will give you a clear picture of the problem. From there, you can start creating solutions that will help lower your unsubscribe rate.
For example, if the issue is impersonal emails, then all you’d need to do is create a few more specialized campaigns that you can send to smaller segments of your whole list.
In line with that, once you’ve improved the campaign, you can also retarget the users who have already unsubscribed and show them what you have now. By making your campaigns more specific and segmenting your list into smaller groups, you can start sending emails that feel more personal and are more relevant to each individual on your list.
This will help not only with retention but also loyalty.
Here Are Some Opt-Out Processes
Different companies handle opt-outs in different ways. Then the unsubscribe link is usually placed in the footer because that’s where most people expect to find it.
But after they click that link, what happens? Here are some ideas:
Show them a confirmation page.
When a subscriber clicks the unsubscribe link, some companies will just redirect them to a simple confirmation page saying they are no longer subscribed.
Give them another chance to think about it.
Instead of automatically unsubscribing the user, redirect them to a page that asks them to confirm their decision. This way, if users just accidentally clicked the button or are still on the fence about unsubscribing, they have more time to change their minds.
After asking them to rethink their decision, you can go the extra mile of asking them to come back.
Allow the audience to subscribe to more specific lists available.
Since personalization is one of the major factors of unsubscribes (i.e. users feel that the content of the emails is irrelevant to them), then providing smaller, more specific lists to subscribe to might change that.
Another reason for people to opt-out of your mailing list is because your company and others like it are sending too many emails. Giving users the option to subscribe to a smaller list also solves this problem, as emails will come less frequently.
Have a short survey to figure out what caused the unsubscribe.
Learn as much as you can! By identifying the cause of the opt-out, you can create better segments in your list and create emails that are even better suited to your target audience.
Before We Let You Go
And that’s why you should provide a clear process for opting out for people who want to unsubscribe. Having an opt-out method is not hurting your business or your campaign — it actually helps it quite a bit.
By letting your users opt-out, you get to learn more about your users while also keeping your list clean. If all the people on your mailing list want to be there, then your engagement (i.e. open rates, click-through rates, replies, forwards and shares, etc.) will just keep getting higher.
