Email unsubscribes are inevitable, no matter how clean of an email list you have or how attractive and perfect your campaigns are. But how you handle them can make or break your email performance.
Neglecting to manage unsubscribed recipients can silently erode your sender reputation, lower campaign performance, and even risk compliance violations.
If you’ve ever wondered whether you're still emailing people who opted out, or struggled to decide what you should do with these email addresses, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll walk you through a practical, foolproof way to handle unsubscribed contacts.
Why unsubscribed contacts need proactive handling
An unsubscribed recipient is someone who has opted out of receiving certain or all types of emails from your business.
If you don’t handle unsubscriptions straightaway and keep sending out emails to contacts that have request to unsubscribe from your emails, it’ll have multiple negative affects:
- Erodes trust
- Damages brand reputation
- Increases the risk of being marked as spam
- Detoriates the email campaign performance
- Affects the email deliverability of your entire domain in the long run
- Blacklisting
Unsubscription management isn’t commonly offered
Many platforms expect you to manage unsubscribes manually or give you only partial visibility into what users opted out of. Some don’t enforce suppression across all campaigns. Others make it hard to import or sync external opt-outs.
The result? You’re left patching together workarounds, hoping unsubscribed users don’t slip through the cracks.
This is exactly where Mailmodo shines — by automating, simplifying, and securing your unsubscribe management process.
How to handle unsubscribed contacts effectively
There are series of steps that you might want to take or rather a checklist that you would want to follow to ensure that you’re handling your unsubscribed contacts effectively. Here’s what you need to do:
1. Monitor unsubscribe trends
Use Mailmodo’s analytics dashboard to get an idea about the unsubscribe counts. You can get this for individual campaigns and better understand what’s causing recipients to unsubscribe and make data-informed decisions to prevent more unsubscriptions or at least reduce the unsubscription rate. It gives you a benchmark for you to follow.
2. Use segmentation to exclude unsubscribed contacts from campaigns
Mailmodo offers a dynamic segmentation feature taht allows you to filter out unsubscribed users from your campaigns automatically in real-time.
Here’s how you can set it up:
- Go to the Contacts tab and click on Create Segment
- Choose to Start from scratch
- Choose the exclude contacts option
- From the dropdown that appears, choose the option Unsubscribed from all email types
- Under Select segment type, choose the Dynamic segment option
- Save the segment
Once you’ve set this up, it ensures that once someone unsubscribes, they’re automatically removed from the segment you created. The dynamic nature of the segment also ensures that it is updated and remains true at all times.
3. Add unsubscribed users to suppression lists
Mailmodo also provides robust suppression list management — both automated and manual. So, here are the two ways it works:
Automatic suppression: When a user clicks "unsubscribe," Mailmodo immediately adds them to the relevant suppression list. This prevents all existing and future campaigns to send emails to them.
Manual suppression: You can upload a CSV of unsubscribed users via Contacts > Suppression List > Upload, and Mailmodo filters them out, especially useful when syncing opt-outs from external tools.
4. Run re-subscription campaigns
It’s hard to let your subscribers go and there might be cases where you want to give it one last try. Maybe someone unsubscribed by mistake or changed their mind, you can re-subscribe them — but only with their explicit permission.
For this, you can connect your existing landing page or form and try to collect consent from them to resume email campaigns. For those who provide consent, you can remove them from the suppression list manually.
This keeps your list compliant while offering a clean path for re-engagement.
Final thoughts
Unsubscribes aren’t just numbers — they’re a reality check.
Managing them well is about respecting user choices, staying compliant, and keeping your list healthy. With Mailmodo’s suppression lists, segmentation, and contact management, you can ensure no unsubscribed recipient gets mailed again, without extra work or risk.
