Any tips for unsubscribes?

If a recipient wants to stop receiving your emails, they have a few options. They can unsubscribe, they can click “spam”, or they can just do nothing. Unsubscribing is actually the least damaging option! By unsubscribing, they’re indicating that they believe you will honor their preferences. Mailbox providers don’t track unsubscribes, so there is no associated reputation damage when someone unsubscribes. By contrast, spam complaints are the strongest negative signal that users can send, indicating that mail is unwanted or even malicious. If the recipient just does nothing and ignores your mail altogether, the mailbox provider will ultimately determine that the mail is unwanted, and though it may not be outright spam, it’s also not valuable enough to merit inbox placement and can safely be filtered to the spam folder. If enough users respond in that way, it will negatively impact your sender reputation and more mail will gradually be filtered as spam for larger portions of the audience. 

Since you don’t want users to unsubscribe, but you also don’t want them to ignore the mail or report it as spam, the only remaining option is to make sure recipients want to continue receiving mail from you! This is important year round, but don’t overlook your subscription process. It’s easy to collect addresses that are invalid, outdated, misspelled, or just low-quality, especially if subscription is incentivized (like with a coupon code) or required (like during registration). Ask people directly if they want to receive your emails, and make it easy for them to decline. Always perform double opt-in to ensure that addresses are valid and belong to the correct person. Implement a strong sunset policy to remove unengaged addresses from your mailable audience. 

Around the holidays especially, content is crucial–you need to send mail that people actually enjoy receiving, whether it makes them smile or keeps them informed. This is also another great opportunity to highlight your preference center and give subscribers the option of reducing the amount or type of messaging they receive, or to even pause their subscription until after the holidays. You could move your preference center and unsubscribe link to the top of your email in addition to featuring them in the footer. Losing a subscriber isn’t ideal, but if someone is looking for a way to make the mail stop, unsubscribing is a much more appealing method than a spam complaint, and that “spam” button is very easy to find.