1) Making it too easy to unsubscribe
It is bizarre, but many people think about their unsubscribe link in the same way they do their CTA buttons. This is strange as obviously you want people clicking the CTA’s but not the unsubscribe link. The top 3 things people do which make it too easy to unsubscribe are: A) Positioning the unsubscribe link directly below main content of email. B) The unsubscribe button is too big! C) The unsubscribe button is surrounded by blank space.
2) Your content isn’t valuable
If you want people to actually stop unsubscribing from your emails, you need to improve the content you give them. This means ensuring all of your email campaigns have: 1) A clear purpose 2) Content contains emotion 3) No typos!
If you ensure your email communications are all of the above then you can expect to see your unsubscribe rate diminish rapidly.
3) Your email looks like spam
Spammy emails either a) get weeded out by email spam filters or b) don’t get opened by the reader because they look fishy (customer just unsubscribes)! Obviously you don’t want this so you should take measures to avoid looking spammy, for example not overly using capital letters or exclamations marks. This will help bring the amount of people who unsubscribe down.
4) Too much/too little content
It's bad to send both a 5000 word article or a 10 word article! But again, this comes back to quality as if the 5000 word article is extremely valuable, the recipient is likely to read every bit of it and not subscribe! But as a general rule of thumb its best to keep the length between 50-125 words, in order to get the best results from the email.
5) Emails look awful on mobiles!
The fact is at least half of all emails are opened on a mobile device (53%), this makes t critical to ensure you don’t only design and test your campaigns on a pc but on a mobile phone aswell. Realistically if your emails look terrible and aren’t formatted well on mobile devices, people will unsubscribe in their droves. Being honest? so they should! Make sure you always test for a wide variety of devices and you will see your email unsubscribe rate go down.