Why Unsubscribes Can Be A Good Thing

From Lyris: White Papers; The Role of DNS, Unsubscribes, and Bounces in Email Deliverability 

Can unsubscribes be good? No sender ever wants to lose an address of course, but when one turns bad or a recipient asks to stop receiving mail, it can actually be a blessing in disguise.

Why? Because spammers work hard to make their mail look as legitimate as possible—in other words, to make it look like your mail. So aside from what you send, recipients and ISPs also recognize you as a good sender by how you behave. A clear, easy, and effective unsubscribe process is the perfect opportunity to distinguish yourself as one of the good guys, and this can really help if blockages or other delivery problems should arise.

Here are three more reasons to smile as you’re removing email addresses from your list:

1.) Unsubscribe requests keep your list vital and responsive

One of the strongest tenets of the federal CAN-SPAM law www.lyris.com/resources/antispam/canspam_faq.html) requires senders to honor all unsubscribe requests within ten days, and the Federal Trade Commission has proposed that the number of days be reduced to three. Rather than view this new development as a stricture, however, consider that this requirement is actually likely to work in favor of most marketing goals. By processing unsubscribe requests quickly, lists are kept populated with recipients who actually want to receive your mail—and traditional direct marketing wisdom tells us that such recipients tend to be the most interested and responsive to offers and other messages.

So, while there’s no doubt the sending environment is becoming more regulated, the legitimate email marketer should greet unsubscribe requests gladly and view them just as a gardener does pruning: as an opportunity to keep your list well-formed and fruitful.

2.) Removing bad addresses has long-term deliverability benefits

Some marketers have a hard time saying goodbye to bad addresses, rationalizing that there’s no harm in trying to send to truly undeliverable addresses if there’s a chance of getting through. But this strategy can actually do a great deal of harm to your overall deliverability. ISPs quickly lose patience with senders who repeatedly send to inactive addresses since processing erroneous mail uses their resources. In addition, sending to a high percentage of “dead” addresses can be interpreted by the ISP as an indication that your list may have been harvested and that you—the sender—are a spammer. So if an address bounces twice, sacrifice it to the cause of greater deliverability and overall ISP relations. Set your software or service to remove it automatically after a couple of failures—and don’t look back.

3.)Unsubscribes are infinitely preferable to the other way recipients can ask to stop receiving your mail

When recipients ask you to remove them from your list, it means that they’re choosing to follow your unsubscribe process, instead of complaining to their ISP that your mail is spam. In this sense, unsubscribe requests are a sign from recipients that they trust you to honor their requests. If there’s no easy way for them to unsubscribe, or if past unsubscribe requests have been ignored or failed, they’re much more likely to hit the “this is spam” button. When a recipient unsubscribes from your list, remember that you’re simply losing a single email address. On the other hand, when enough recipients click the “this is spam” button, your mail could ultimately be blocked ISPs, or worse—you could be added to blacklists.