Once you go to the effort of getting someone on your email list, of course you want them to stay there.

And in most cases, you’re emailing when you have something interesting to say, and you’re producing compelling content that means that your subscribers will never, ever, want to leave.

But there are a bunch of reasons why you should make it really easy for them to do that, anyway.

1) Some subscribers will mark you as spam instead of unsubscribing.

The more people who mark you as spam, the higher risk that GMail (for example) will mark your email as spam for all of its users. Avoid this by letting people tell you, with very little effort, when they’re not interested.

2) It looks good.

Even if I’m not planning to unsubscribe from your email, providing the option shows respect and consideration for your users. It also prevents them from complaining on social media.

3) The difficulty of your unsubscribe process shouldn’t be what keeps people on your list.

Amazon offers its warehouse associates $5,000 every year to quit the company. Why? They don’t want people onboard who don’t want to be there.

In the same way, in most cases you don’t want email subscribers who don’t want to be there. Yes, there’s room for convincing people, but your marketing process at every other step of the funnel is about generating the right leads, not just leads in general.

If someone tells you they’re not the right person, take their word for it.

4) It lets you focus your efforts better.

Database segmentation can be tricky, but at least part of the “people who are very unlikely to buy from you” segment can be delineated very quickly. Your understanding of your database, and your marketing efforts, will be much better if you can reduce that segment to zero or almost zero members.

Also, allowing people to unsubscribe easily, especially if you provide the option to tell you why they unsubscribed, can give you valuable data to increase your emails’ effectiveness.