Unsubscribe me – please! 5 best practices

What impression do you leave with subscribers who choose to opt out from your email list? Keep in mind that just because they want to unsubscribe, doesn’t mean they no longer want to be a customer. So if your unsubscribe process is confusing, takes too long, and causes frustration, you’ll leave prospects and customers with negative feelings about your company. Plus, they’ll be much more likely to mark your email as spam if they can’t find the unsubscribe link, which can negatively impact your deliverability and return on investment.

1) Provide a simple and easy unsubscribe option: The key to ensuring customer satisfaction is to make the unsubscribe process easy. The link should take the recipient directly to a page where they can automatically unsubscribe. If you’re a NewZapp customer we will automatically create an unsubscribe link for you on every email you send out. 

2) Don’t hide the unsubscribe link: Provide a visible, underlined, one click unsubscribe link in the footer of your email. You can also try placing it in the header to see if this is more effective for your audience. The more a company tries to hide the unsubscribe link, the higher the complaint rate.

3) Regularly test your unsubscribe link: A lot of unsubscribe links do not work because they are never tested, except at the time of creation. Before each send out test the link and make sure that the recipient has been removed from your mailing list. Here at NewZapp we regularly test the unsubscribe function so this should never be a problem for our customers.

4) Confirmation: Confirm the successful unsubscribe immediately after. This reassures users that you have dealt with their request and looks professional. Again, if you’re a NewZapp customer we will handle this for you by displaying an ‘unsubscribe successful’ message on the screen.

5) Checking replies: Monitor your reply inbox on a regular basis as users sometimes unsubscribe by replying to the email. If this isn’t checked you could risk missing unsubscribes and as a result could receive complaints from the customer next time you send to them or worse, they will mark you as spam.

Article by Gracie Stewart of NewZapp Email Marketing.

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