When offering a free download – and who doesn’t love those! – be sure to tell folks exactly what and how often you’ll be sending once they opt-in. Then when you do send something, make sure it’s highly relevant and immediately obvious why they’re receiving it. Otherwise they feel duped and abused.

Don’t wait so long that they forget signing up or lose interest! That’ll surely get you unsubscribes and spam reports.

If you send multiple types of email to your list, do some segmenting and give people options and opportunities to segment themselves by interest. That all or nothing approach pisses me off and I can’t unsubscribe quickly enough.

Oddly enough, here’s something that sometimes keeps me on a mailing I was just about to unsubscribe from: Make it very easy and obvious how to unsubscribe, including a reminder of why I’m on the list and an apology in case I’ve received in error. I’m amazed at how many email marketers, still don’t even provide the minimum required by the CAN-SPAM Act. Go so far as to ask why they’re unsubscribing. You might get useful feedback for improvement, and they’ll feel better having that outlet. Less reason to hit that Send to Spam button in frustration.

Bottom line: Go out of your way to be respectful of everyone’s limited time, attention, and already overflowing inboxes.

If I see a link on the site about downloading a free ebook and I’m automatically subscribed, choose to download the email, then become automatically subscribed, I’ll check out the newsletter even though I normally end up removing myself from the list after.

If I’m forced into a download, THEN forced into a newsletter, I won’t flag it, but I’ll be annoyed and unsubscribe without checking it.

While the first option is admittingly a much slower process, I think that for the long haul it’s a much better one. Following that format, it’s much more likely that the people on your email newsletter mailing list actually READ the newsletter, and that is what is important.