Anyone who has a list is concerned with unsubscriptions from their communications - but sometimes unsubscribes can be seen as a positive thing too.

Mark Brownlow over at Email Marketing Reports has been testing different unsubscribe methods and recently tried placing the unsubscribe link at the top of his newsletter. The unsubscribe rate basically doubled and he was quite happy about it.

Huh? Happy?

Yep, and his reasoning is quite solid in my opinion.

Mark basically feels that if someone doesn’t want to be on his list, then they should be able to easily leave it. Every unsubscribe is one less potential spam report, annoyed reader and one less email being shoved through alread congested “tubes”.

While I wouldn’t put an unsubscribe link at the top of a newsletter, I certainly agree that subscribers shouldn’t be made to jump through hoops to get off a list. As mentioned recently, nearly a third of people participating in a recent survey on email marketing said they *stopped* doing business with at least one company who had poor email practices.

Additionally, if you’re trying to sell space on your newsletter, a potential advertiser with any nous is going to want to know open rates. A very low open rate is going to set off alarm bells and achieve a much lower possible price. A high open rate can attract big biccies, even on a relatively small list as, it’s an indicator to the advertiser that subscribers to that list are really interested in the content of the newsletter.

Sometimes less is more and a clean list is a good list.

By the way, Mark has a ton of great content on Email Marketing Reports; definitely worth subscribing to.

Related:

Gauging email open rates
Autoresponder software and mailing list managers
Email delivery issues