Make Your Unsubscribe Link Prominent

It may seem counterintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense to put your unsubscribe link in a place that can’t be missed.

Although it may seem like a waste of valuable real estate, putting your unsubscribe link in the header of each email is something that can pay off for you in the long run.

The DMA Email Marketing Council explains why:

[A] typical scenario is where the email recipient knows and accepts that the email was solicited by them at some stage in the past, but now wants to be removed from the list, and can’t see any obvious way of doing so (usually because the unsubscribe link is buried in a 6 point font somewhere in the email footer in the hope that it won’t be seen!). In such a situation, the spam button then becomes a convenient alternative to unsubscribing!

This represents a double-whammy for the e-marketer – in addition to losing a member from the mailing list, these notifications are fed back to the ISP that the email account is held with, which ultimately compromises the sender reputation of the sender if these notifications are received in sufficient quantities. And we are not talking big numbers here – Return Path regards complaint rate statistics of greater than 0.65% of all emails sent as indicative of “high risk” status.