Even with the best providers, email list management is dreadful. It’s like walking a tightrope. Wobble too far in one direction and you’re toast. You don’t want to email your list too much and risk bloating their inbox and driving them to unsubscribe. But if you don’t email them enough, they’ll forget about you, or forget they subscribed and report your next email as spam.

You want a quality, responsive email list, but you also want to grow a big email list, and teeter between single opt-in and double opt-in. You’ve been doing email marketing a long time and have a big list, but your open rates are low and you’re not sure people are even paying attention.

And don’t even get me started on the poor souls who at some point need to switch email marketing providers, move their lists, and get people to re-opt-in on a new system.

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Publishing a quality email newsletter regularly is a lot of work, and ideally we would love for each person who opts-in to stay forever and open all of our emails, but that is simply not reality. It is inevitable that at some point a subscriber is going to want to leave your list and unsubscribe. At this point the question becomes, “How will you handle it?”

Will you make it easy for email subscribers who no longer want to receive your emails to opt-out or unsubscribe? Or will you make it difficult and uncomfortable, forcing them to hunt and work to remove their name from your email marketing list — while they get frustrated and irritated, and more likely to just hit delete or mark it as spam? (Please don’t choose the latter!)

Providing an easy, clear unsubscribe option and a commitment to permission will help build trust with your subscribers. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of articles online about growing your email list and building your database. But only a few actually address WANTING people to unsubscribe.

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Email marketing is permission-based marketing, which means you must have permission to add people to your marketing list, and permission to email them information. Every email newsletter, ezine, or email marketing communication should have a clear, straight-forward unsubscribe or opt-out link, and opt-out or unsubscribe requests should be handled immediately.

Email addresses should be obtained only by legitimate means like through opt-in boxes or subscribe boxes on your website, or by specific request. This is why email marketing lists are often called opt-in lists. Valid contact information should be included in every piece of email marketing and a privacy policy should be provided.

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