What does one-click unsubscribe mean?
Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2025 10:18 am
One-click unsubscribe: The new imperative for email marketing
If you’re not living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about “one-click unsubscribe” everywhere! One-click subscriptions have become a hot topic since Google and Yahoo updated their email sending guidelines. However, it’s not as simple as putting an unsubscribe button in your emails. To stay compliant, you must support one-click functionality in your list email headers. Let’s learn more about this!
What is one-click unsubscribe?
One-click unsubscribe is a link inserted at the bottom of phone number list the email that allows you to easily unsubscribe with just one click. Once clicked, the recipient will be automatically removed from the mailing list.
Who is affected?
Enabling one-click unsubscribe is one of the new email requirements announced by Google and Yahoo. The requirement only affects bulk email senders who send more than 5,000 emails per day. The policy will take effect on June 1, 2024.
Google's requirements
Google announced the following requirements to comply with its one-click unsubscribe rule:
Google recommends that only marketing and promotional emails need a one-click unsubscribe option. Transactional emails such as shipping and order confirmation emails, account creation emails, password resets, etc. do not need this feature.
When enabling one-click unsubscribe for emails, it’s important to focus on the user’s intent. This way, you can easily differentiate between the emails that require this feature and those that don’t.
For example, emails you send to potential customers to market your products need a simple unsubscribe feature. However, if a customer purchases your product online, they will expect to receive an order confirmation email or an invoice receipt. Such transactional emails do not require an unsubscribe link.
There must be an unsubscribe link in the body of the email
You can place it somewhere easily noticeable, such as in the footer. The link should not be hidden or difficult to read, and it should be clear enough not to mislead the recipient.
Unsubscribing from emails should be a one-click, easy process. If your recipients have to go through a lot of effort to stop receiving your emails, you’re not doing it right!
Ideally, when someone clicks on your unsubscribe link, it should take effect immediately. You must ensure that your one-click unsubscribe link does not redirect users to a landing page or web page. At this step, the unsubscriber does not need to provide additional information or register.
Senders of bulk emails must enable one-click unsubscribe functionality consistent with RFC 8508. To do this, you can add a List-Unsubscribe header to your emails.
The benefit of using the RFC 8508 compliant List-Unsubscribe header is that, unlike mail-to or URLs, unsubscribing is very simple.
If you use an email service provider like MailChimp, SendGrid, Constant Contact, etc., you must contact them. Your service provider will assist you in adding these headers to the emails you send.
Delete unsubscribed users
Once someone unsubscribes from your emails using the one-click unsubscribe button, you must exclude them. Remove them from your mailing list as soon as possible. Ideally, within 48 hours.
In such cases, Google recommends taking action as quickly as possible to respect the wishes of recipients who wish to be excluded. This further demonstrates your commitment to reducing spam for Gmail recipients.
Your unsubscribe link should always work. In the event of an unexpected outage, while your emails will not be marked as spam, you may face delivery issues.
If you’re not living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about “one-click unsubscribe” everywhere! One-click subscriptions have become a hot topic since Google and Yahoo updated their email sending guidelines. However, it’s not as simple as putting an unsubscribe button in your emails. To stay compliant, you must support one-click functionality in your list email headers. Let’s learn more about this!
What is one-click unsubscribe?
One-click unsubscribe is a link inserted at the bottom of phone number list the email that allows you to easily unsubscribe with just one click. Once clicked, the recipient will be automatically removed from the mailing list.
Who is affected?
Enabling one-click unsubscribe is one of the new email requirements announced by Google and Yahoo. The requirement only affects bulk email senders who send more than 5,000 emails per day. The policy will take effect on June 1, 2024.
Google's requirements
Google announced the following requirements to comply with its one-click unsubscribe rule:
Google recommends that only marketing and promotional emails need a one-click unsubscribe option. Transactional emails such as shipping and order confirmation emails, account creation emails, password resets, etc. do not need this feature.
When enabling one-click unsubscribe for emails, it’s important to focus on the user’s intent. This way, you can easily differentiate between the emails that require this feature and those that don’t.
For example, emails you send to potential customers to market your products need a simple unsubscribe feature. However, if a customer purchases your product online, they will expect to receive an order confirmation email or an invoice receipt. Such transactional emails do not require an unsubscribe link.
There must be an unsubscribe link in the body of the email
You can place it somewhere easily noticeable, such as in the footer. The link should not be hidden or difficult to read, and it should be clear enough not to mislead the recipient.
Unsubscribing from emails should be a one-click, easy process. If your recipients have to go through a lot of effort to stop receiving your emails, you’re not doing it right!
Ideally, when someone clicks on your unsubscribe link, it should take effect immediately. You must ensure that your one-click unsubscribe link does not redirect users to a landing page or web page. At this step, the unsubscriber does not need to provide additional information or register.
Senders of bulk emails must enable one-click unsubscribe functionality consistent with RFC 8508. To do this, you can add a List-Unsubscribe header to your emails.
The benefit of using the RFC 8508 compliant List-Unsubscribe header is that, unlike mail-to or URLs, unsubscribing is very simple.
If you use an email service provider like MailChimp, SendGrid, Constant Contact, etc., you must contact them. Your service provider will assist you in adding these headers to the emails you send.
Delete unsubscribed users
Once someone unsubscribes from your emails using the one-click unsubscribe button, you must exclude them. Remove them from your mailing list as soon as possible. Ideally, within 48 hours.
In such cases, Google recommends taking action as quickly as possible to respect the wishes of recipients who wish to be excluded. This further demonstrates your commitment to reducing spam for Gmail recipients.
Your unsubscribe link should always work. In the event of an unexpected outage, while your emails will not be marked as spam, you may face delivery issues.