Understanding Unsubscriptions

Learn more about unsubscription best practices, and how you can reduce your unsubscription rates.

Why is adhering to unsubscription requests important?

Aside from regulatory compliance, healthy communication with your recipient base is important. This means respecting their preferences in managing their inboxes, which has knock-on impacts on their attitudes towards interacting with your agency, and their openness to receiving future communications from you.

Furthermore, if recipients are unable to locate the unsubscribe link in emails, they may resort to marking your emails as spam. This will not only restrict your emails from getting to them in the future, but will also hurt Postman’s reputation score and future email deliverability.

Since Postman is the communications channel through which they receive these mailers, it is also good governance on our end to help both users like you, and your recipients, get the best experience out of using Postman.

What is a good unsubscribe rate?

Various sources peg a good unsubscribe rate in the range of <2%. Campaign Monitor found an average unsubscribe rate of 0.17%, so you can use this as a rule of thumb when analysing your own unsubscription data. Read more here.

How do I reduce unsubscription rates?

There are several ways to reduce the likelihood of a recipient unsubscribing from your campaigns:

1. Segment your mailing list carefully - you would want to carefully consider the exact profiles of recipients that fit your purposes, rather than sending to the entire mailing list. This increases the relevance of your campaign to their needs/preferences/interests.

2. Make your emails easy-to-read - this means less wordiness, get to the point, with important information up front. This reduces reader fatigue, and helps your readers understand immediately the purpose of your campaign.

3. Keep your subject lines short and direct (5 words or less) - this makes your email look less like an ad.

4. Frequency - if you are sending out regular campaigns, find a frequency that fits your reader base best. There is no hard and fast rule, depending on the content of your campaign.