Let’s say you have a subscriber who has decided that she no longer wants to receive your newsletter.  Do you want her to:

1. Do nothing in the hope that she will find one of your future email campaigns of interest, or
2. Click on the unsubscribe link

Because the cost of emailing to that subscriber is pennies (or less), many marketers automatically think that #1 is the best answer.  It’s not.   Subscribers who no longer want your email can be much more expensive than the actual incremental cost of sending her an email.  

Obviously, you want to do whatever you can to provide truly engaging, useful content to your subscribers.  However, once a subscriber has decided that she doesn’t want to receive your emails anymore, you really do want her to click on that unsubscribe link.  Why?

Today, people are increasingly clicking on a report spam button or link instead of the unsubscribing when they want to stop receiving your emails.  There are doing this because many email clients (especially ones like Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail) make it very easy – the spam button is usually more prominent than the unsubscribe link. 

Those spam reports hurt sender reputation (whether ISPs or spam filters think you are a legitimate email marketer or spammer) , which is one of the most important, if not the most important, factor that determines whether your email will go to the inbox, be caught in a corporate spam filter, or go directly to the junk folder. 

So, don’t just review unsubscribe activity but also look at how people on your list are interacting with your emails.  If someone hasn’t clicked-through on one of your newsletters in six months, they aren’t providing much value and they could be costing you.  It doesn’t mean that you should just remove those email addresses from your list.  There are actions that you can take to try to ‘recover’ those subscribers and that will be covered in an upcoming post.