I Feel Guilty About Unsubscribing from Email Newsletters I Never Read

It shouldn’t be so hard to unsubcribe, but it is.

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I feel guilty about unsubscribing from email newsletters.

Do you ever feel that way?

You’re checking your personal email account & there’s this one newsletter you just skip over when you see it. Like, it doesn’t even register in your mind when they email you anymore. Your eyes just skip past like it’s not even there at all.

One day, you realize you have a lot of unread emails. You take a closer look at them & see The Newsletter.

“Oh, I forgot I receive their emails still. Boy, there sure are a lot of them. All of them are unread.”

“When was the last time I opened one?”

Sometimes you only pay notice because the sender sends you one of those “Hey, let me know if you still want to receive my emails” emails, which typically inform you it’s been like a year since you even OPENED one, much less read it.

Or it’s a newsletter that has good information that has helped you in the past. Sure, you might open them, but you always make them unread without reading them so you can read them at some point in the future.

You say to yourself,

“There’s at least a hundred of these clogging up my inbox! I have 3,052 unread emails, but I feel like none of them are really important.”

You take a look at The Newsletter.

“Pretty boring. Why did I even sign up for it? Oh, that’s right. I got a free ebook if I did.”

You scroll down to the bottom to click the “unsubscribe” button. Should be pretty easy. You haven’t read The Newsletter in more than a year, the information is often mediocre, or maybe it’s a store you don’t really shop at.

But that’s when the sweat starts running down your face. Your finger or your cursor hovers, as uncertain as a chihuahua at an airport, over the unsubscribe button.

“But I LIKE supporting this company. If I’m not following them, this poor person is going to go out of business.” You say, if the email in question is the newsletter of a small business.

No, they won’t. You’re not doing them any favors by not reading their newsletter. All you’re doing is potentially costing them money if they have to pay for a certain number of subscribers, & making their send-to-open ratio a whole lot lower. If you’re not buying from them, & you never open their newsletter, you are not actually helping them, only feeling like you are. So unless it’s your mom’s business & you’re her only email subscriber, if you don’t open or ever buy from the newsletter, HIT THAT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON.

“But SOMETIMES I learn something interesting.” You say, if the newsletter in question is informative.

Yes, you might. BUT ONLY IF YOU OPEN AND READ IT. You are literally learning nothing by staying subscribed to a newsletter you never read. NADA. So here, you must face a choice: either begin opening & READING these emails so you can learn what you should have been learning anyways, or HIT THAT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON.

“But sometimes they have good coupons! I don’t want to miss out on a sale. What if they have something I might want?” You say, looking at the marketing newsletter from a medium/large.

A classic case of FOMO. You don’t wanna unsubscribe from the Groupon newsletter because sometimes they have sales you want to take advantage of. FINE. But if you never open the newsletters or never use the coupons they send (NEWSFLASH: probably because you don’t actually like shopping there are much as you think you do), YOU ARE NOT HELPING YOURSELF OR THE COMPANY. Also, especially if it’s a large company, literally hundreds or even THOUSANDS of people might unsubscribe from it daily. To them, you’re just a number. They’re not going to go out of business because you unsubscribed. No tears will be shed in the marketing department when you HIT THAT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON.

Moral of the story: if you never read it, never use it, or don’t need to use it, HIT THAT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON. No one who creates the newsletter is probably going to cry over you unsubscribing. There’s really no reason to feel guilty about unsubscribing.

And here’s the most magical part of all: if at some point in the future, you realize you miss the newsletter…

YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE TO IT AGAIN!

*cues balloons & confetti

And if you’re afraid of forgetting the newsletter, write down a list somewhere of what you have unsubscribed from.

You really have nothing to lose by unsubscribing. So how about you hit that unsubscribe button & experiment with not getting the newsletter, at least for a while.

Try unsubscribing. You might just like it.