The other day, I received an email from a local restaurant. Their emails are terrible, irrelevant, and useless, but for some reason, I never opted out, I guess because their messages were mostly going to my spam box.

On this day, their email landed in my inbox. I opened it and was immediately turned off. That’s it, I thought — time to opt-out.

When I clicked on the opt-out link, I was presented a page that I thought should pre-load my email address in it. But it didn’t. I guess I’ll have to do this manually … so I tried typing my email address into the Web form. But, the text fields in which I would enter my email address didn’t work.

As if getting the emails wasn’t bad enough, I was now putting way too much effort into trying to unsubscribe. That’s a sure-fire way to lose any last ounce of goodwill they may have had.

A day or so after the above experience, I received two emails from the American Marketing Association (somehow they got both my professional and personal email and I get two of every send). So, I decided enough was enough and tried to unsubscribe my personal email address from their campaigns.

After I clicked the opt-out button, I was presented a list of about 6 or so different campaigns the AMA sends — they asked me to check the campaigns I wanted to opt-out of. None of the items were pre-checked. Thus, I had no idea which campaigns I was already subscribed, nor which ones to remove myself from. So instead of making it easy for me to opt-out, I have to start thinking various strategies to make this work properly.

The moral of this story: if you are putting some effort into email marketing, make sure — make absolutely sure — that your audience can EASILY opt-out of your messages. You may not want to lose them, but you don’t want to annoy them either. If you don’t take care of this, you’re going to be losing a lot more than just an opt-out.