Make It Easier to Unsubscribe from Your Email Outreach

Do you ever get this at the bottom of an email you want to unsubscribe? 

“To unsubscribe, please reply with “STOP””

When I get an email that is unsolicited from somebody I don’t want to hear from or who didn’t make their case, it really irritates the heck out of me when they put at the bottom to send a reply saying opt out.

That my friends, is BS. That isn’t an actual opt-out, it’s a confirmation that your email address is real and it inflates their response rates. All of which is bad or at least misleading for them but they aren’t apparently informed enough to know that.

One of the best insights that I can offer you is to tell you to read your outbound marketing emails with the same critical analysis as you do the ones you receive..Nobody wants to get emails that they don’t want or they’re not interested in. And one of the best things that somebody can do on your behalf is to make it easy to opt out. If they’re not a prospect, you don’t want them clogging up your email list, reducing your open rates and potentially putting you in spam and blocking you. Which is the worst possible result.

Let me make that really clear, do you want them to opt out or do you want them to mark you as spam? Apparently that answer isn’t obvious to some. You want them to opt out. When you get marked as spam, your email reputation is damaged and you will be filtered out by more and more organizations as your reputation gets worse. When I get an email asking me to send an email back unsubscribing, I instantly know that the company or person sending the email is not a professional in email marketing. If they can’t do email right, why would I think they will be any good at the service they want me to purchase?

At TSG, we spent a lot of time trying to ensure that we are sending to the right people and that we have a high deliverability rate. No “ spray and pray” here. We make sure that our unsubscribe link is easy to find. I’ve seen them buried in copy, I’ve seen them in a lighter font and other tricks to make it harder to unsubscribe. This is crazy. You should make it easy for them to unsubscribe.

Email list recipients are helping you out by hitting your unsubscribe button rather than marking you as spam.