People are going to unsubscribe from your email list. It’s not fun, but it’s inevitable. No matter how strong your email marketing is, you’re not going to keep 100% of your subscribers forever.
Average unsubscribe rates vary by industry, but they typically fall between 1% and 2%. That may sound disheartening, but the truth is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You don’t want to lose subscribers you worked hard to earn, but a bigger list isn’t always a better list. Subscribers who aren’t interested in your emails can drag down engagement and make it harder to understand what’s actually working.
In this article, we’ll look at why people unsubscribe, what you can do to reduce unnecessary unsubscribes, and when removing disengaged subscribers yourself might actually make sense.
The 5 big reasons people unsubscribe, and how to remedy them
We looked at research from Media Post, MarketingSherpa, and Litmus to better understand why people hit unsubscribe. While each study approached the question a little differently, a few common themes stood out.
Here are five of the most common reasons people unsubscribe from marketing emails, and what you can do to keep more subscribers engaged.
1. You send too many emails
There’s nothing you can really do about the people who unsubscribe because they feel like they get too many emails in general. However, you can make sure your business isn’t contributing to inbox overload.
Start by reviewing your email marketing frequency. There’s no magic number that works for every business; the right cadence depends on factors like your industry, product catalog, and the value your emails provide. If your unsubscribe rate starts climbing, try sending fewer emails and see whether it makes a difference.
You can also offer an opt-down option. Instead of forcing subscribers to choose between receiving every email and leaving your list entirely, let them hear from you less often. After all, they signed up for a reason.
2. Irrelevant emails
Irrelevant content is another big reason people unsubscribe. And that’s fair—if you live in Hawaii and a company won’t stop sending you emails advertising things like parkas, skis, or travel packages to Hawaii, why would you keep reading them?
Two email marketing tactics can help here: personalization and segmentation.
Personalization isn’t just dropping someone’s first name into a subject line. It’s using what you know about subscribers, like their interests, preferences, browsing behavior, or purchase history, to send emails they’re more likely to care about.
Of course, not every small business has the budget, data, or tools to personalize emails for every individual subscriber. And sometimes that level of targeting just isn’t necessary. That’s where segmentation comes in.
Segmentation lets you divide your email list into broader groups based on things like interests, location, past purchases, or behavior. You can then send each group emails that are more relevant to them without creating a completely different campaign for every subscriber.
For example, if you run a clothing boutique, you can make sure female subscribers get emails about women’s clothing, and male subscribers get emails about men’s clothing.
3. Boring, repetitive, or otherwise bad content
Ideally, your subscribers would be excited to see an email from you show up in their inbox because they know it’ll be interesting, informative, funny, valuable, or helpful. When they’re none of those things, unsubscribing becomes a lot more tempting.
One way to avoid that is simple: Have a real reason to send every email. This could be a sale, a new product, or an informative newsletter. An email marketing calendar can help you find other natural opportunities to reach out. Holidays are an obvious choice, but even less traditional occasions can work when they make sense for your brand. Pi Day, for example, gave the brands below a timely excuse to show up in customers’ inboxes.
Current events can also be a good trigger. Here, the Michigan-based clothing brand M22 used the polar vortex as a chance to fire off an email advertising a sale because it’s the “one time of the year we encourage you to stay inside.”
The studies on why people unsubscribe also reference emails that are focused on the business’s needs, not the customer’s. Obviously, you’re an ecommerce business, and you’re sending emails because you need people to come to your store to spend money. But the goal should be to drive customers to your store because the products you sell can fill a legitimate need in their lives.
That connects back to personalization and segmentation, but it doesn’t always have to mean selling the right product to the right person. Some emails can simply help you get to know your customers, celebrate them, or learn what they want from your business.
4. Bad design, including not being mobile-friendly
Mobile-friendly email design isn’t a bonus anymore; it’s fundamental. If your emails aren’t designed for smaller screens, it’s time for a redesign. The good news is that most email marketing providers offer responsive, mobile-friendly templates.
If your emails feel too cluttered, amateurish, or unfocused, try stripping the design down to the basics. Don’t worry about advanced design techniques like visual hierarchy, A/B tested analogous color pairings, or cross-browser CSS3 keyframe animation. Start with a strong headline, a great image, compelling copy, and a clear call to action. You can always build from there.
Check out this email from the candy company Smart Sweets. It’s ultra simple but looks great and accomplishes the only goal it has: Drive customers to buy stuff with a special discount.
5. They don’t realize they’ve subscribed
It’s happened to all of us: Suddenly, some company starts sending you emails that you never asked for. Maybe you were automatically subscribed after buying something. Maybe your address came from a purchased list. However it happened, you didn’t ask for those emails, so you’re probably heading straight for the unsubscribe button.
That’s one reason to consider double opt-in. Instead of subscribing as soon as someone enters their email address, double opt-in requires them to click a link in a confirmation email before they’re officially added to your list.
Of course, marketers have a good reason to hesitate. Every extra step adds friction, and double opt-in can slow list growth. Studies have found that single opt-in lists can grow 20% to 30% faster, and roughly 1 in 5 people won’t complete the second step of a double opt-in.
But a bigger list isn’t necessarily a better one. Double opt-in helps confirm that subscribers actually want your emails and that the addresses they provide are real. That can mean more engaged subscribers, fewer bounced emails and spam complaints, and less time spent cleaning up your list.
Why unsubscribes aren’t always a bad thing
Some people leaving your list can actually be a good thing because a smaller group of active, engaged subscribers is more valuable than a huge list of people who rarely open or click your emails. Here’s a closer look at why you might not need to panic every time you lose an email subscriber:
1. Increases deliverability due to improved reputation
When your subscribers aren’t opening your emails or clicking through to your website, that sends a message to email clients that you’re sending junk. And if that happens enough, your emails can start to be filtered straight to the dreaded purgatory of the junk folder (you can find out how you’re doing on this front by checking your sender score).
Spam reports can also cause serious problems for email marketers. Too many complaints can hurt your deliverability, send more of your emails to the junk folder, and even put your account with your email provider at risk.
In other words, it’s better for someone to unsubscribe than report you as spam. And, really, it’s better for someone to unsubscribe than stay on your list but never look at your emails. (Not to mention that you do have to pay more money to send to a larger list, and there’s really no upside to spending the extra money to send emails to people who don’t want them.)
Something else you need to watch out for are bounces and spam traps. Bounces happen when a subscriber’s email account is full or when the account is canceled. Those canceled emails are sometimes recycled into spam traps by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). When you send marketing emails to a spam trap address, it’s a sign to the ISP that your emails are junk.
2. Keeps your list filled with solid, engaged prospects
HubSpot once decided to clean up its list of 550,000 subscribers after noticing that engagement and deliverability were slipping. It sent a re-engagement campaign asking inactive subscribers if they still wanted to receive emails.
The result was a major cleanup. HubSpot unsubscribed about 250,000 people, or 45% of its list.
It also identified a likely reason people had stopped engaging: HubSpot was sending four emails a day. It cut that down to one.
Despite shrinking its list to around 300,000 subscribers, HubSpot didn’t see a negative impact on site traffic. The people it removed weren’t visiting the site anyway. The subscribers who stayed were the ones driving traffic all along.
That’s the value of a smaller, more engaged list. Metrics like click-through rates and ROI become more useful because they reflect the behavior of people who actually want to hear from you. You can get a clearer picture of what’s working, what isn’t, and what your subscribers respond to.
3. Unsubscribes can provide valuable feedback
Everyone has a reason for clicking an unsubscribe link. Wouldn’t it be good to know it?
Consider adding a one-question survey to your unsubscribe page asking why the person chose to get off your list. Sure, not everyone will respond, but those who do will provide you with really valuable feedback on what you’re doing wrong. If a high percentage cites your frequency, it’s time to send fewer emails. If a lot of people complain about the quality of your content, address your strategy. If you get a common complaint that they don’t remember signing up, consider going to a double opt-in process.
Even if you don’t run a survey, trends in unsubscribe numbers can still help illuminate some major issues. If one email leads to an especially high jump in unsubscribes, examine that email and figure out what went wrong. Was it too self-promotional? Inappropriate? Polarizing? Poorly designed?
You can also use unsubscribe trends to help determine your ideal email frequency. If you retain way more subscribers by sending two emails a week than three, there’s your sweet spot.
Build an email list worth keeping
Unsubscribes happen. Instead of trying to keep every subscriber forever, focus on giving the right people a reason to stick around. Send useful content, pay attention to what your audience responds to, and make it easy for subscribers to control what lands in their inbox.
Credibility matters, too. GoDaddy Professional Email provides that credibility with a branded email address that matches your domain. Combine that branded email address with the AI-powered email marketing insights provided by GoDaddy Digital Marketing, and you’ll be able to quickly adjust your email marketing strategy to keep your brand top of mind for your customers.
