Email marketing can be as simple or as complex as you make it. The experts in the field take complex ideas and simplify them.

But no matter how simple you think it is, there is one mistake you can’t afford to make. You have to make it simple for your subscribers to take action, even when that action is unsubscribing from your list.

The other day I went to unsubscribe from one email and I got this:

There it is. My email address in big letters across the top. The next thing I expect to see is a brief statement telling me I’ve been removed from the list.

But that’s not it. It asks me to enter my email address to verify that I want to be removed. What?

You know my email address. I just clicked the unsubscribe link in MY email.

Don’t force an extra step. Unsubscribing, just like purchasing or signing up, should be simplified. After I entered my email address and unsubscribed, I went ahead and marked the message as spam because of this process.

Don’t let that happen to you.