How to get the audience to unsubscribe to your emails?

I don’t know about you, but my internet marketing quest has taken me to places I did not think existed. As a result of all that I can proudly say that I know more negatives of the “standard/recommended way to market stuff over internet”, more ways to annoy people, and more ways of making your subscribers get away from you.
I have mentioned about email lists before. Not quite my preferred means of communication, but people seem to like it, some people click on emails rather than spend time on feeds or social media, people use emails many things things – hence using that channel cannot be wrong. I totally get it. But once you acquire subscribers, I don’t understand why some (otherwise smart) people go about alienating them.

courtesy: jean pierre gallot @ flickr

In my search to know and learn more about writing, content marketing and a bit of selling, I subscribed to emails from a lot of sites – more sites than what you can consider healthy. I was forced to subscribe to more than a few since the website owners seemed to think that email is the best and only communication channel. A few others promised thousands of dollars worth of goodies, others promised that I will achieve nirvana and so on. Though my preferred update channel is my feed, I still went about did that since I wanted to know why email marketing is considered one of the best channels ever and how apparently successful marketers do it. While in the process of going through that, I have collected some gems on what to do when you want to loose your subscribers – fast! Without further ado, let us get on with the list.

1. Have HTML emails, which try to put out some banners, images and the like while the user tries to read it. Who does not like a big fat, colourful email that seems to show the whole world?
2. Have generous ads in the emails. Users deserve ads
3. Try to generalize content and use language bordering on spam, so that:
• you can test spam filters in multiple email providers
• try to reach the spam folder safely so that users do not even come to know of the email
4. Have no context to what you are trying to sell. Oh yes, users are surely be overcoming with curiosity to go find out more
5. Before even knowing the user, start blasting some upsells. You have your sales funnel to watch and just cannot wait for the user to get comfortable. Upsell from the very first email, try to get them buy more even before trying out your first "product”. You never know whether they will come back
6. Pump up emails. Yes, users are going to be amazed by the email content generation machine that you have become
7. Make emails personal. Not personal as in “address me by first name”, but start narrating just how much you love your beautiful family as a technology update
8. Try to pass on an affiliate link or two for completely unrelated products - you want to try your luck just one more time

That is all there is to it folks. Do you have any good examples of what to do in emails to get your users hate you?
Before I sign off though, there are more than a couple of examples that are not following the above “proven” methods. I not only subscribe to them wholeheartedly, but the emails become a welcome read after the tiring work of going through the feeds of the day :)

• Emails from copyblogger. You don’t expect anything but the best from them
• Emails from viperchill. Thank you Glen!
• Emails from Pat Flynn of smartpassiveincome are lengthy but absolutely readable and full of information

Why websites maintain email lists (and perform dark arts)?

We have touched upon the subject of email lists before. Though I regret not maintaining it, I do not do it for the continued reason that:

• I am lazy
• I do not think I have intelligent enough things to say that people want to read every week/fortnight/year

But with my enhanced ability to take BS, I do subscribe to a lot of email lists and have a really good conclusion on why websites (especially internet marketing websites) talk about email lists way more than blogs and forums. First the conclusion: maintaining email lists and pumping them information including product advice, affiliate links, and the likes are like people performing dark arts. Yes, more than a few people fall to the advice to earn some money, and fame to the practitioners. No, there are not a lot of people practicing dark arts for the good of humanity.

I will not harp on the goodness of email lists, that has been done before. But it is equally interesting on how email lists avoid the pitfalls and negatives while you are demonstrating your expertise in a public forum.

• Email lists are private. The reader either opens the email or no, the reader may click on the links or otherwise, and the reader may simply move the damn thing to spam. At the end of the day, this remains private. I am free to claim what I want to claim. I do not have to provide insights into how many returning readers actually come over to the website, what percentage of traffic is from email list subscribers, what percentage of readers are led by my other dark arts, and so on. This is crucial while I am trying to play the expert giving some 'gyan' to the lesser mortals
• Opinions are mostly kept private. Unless someone (like me) erupts in some forum or website, the email responses are private, and kept that way. Strong opinions on emails from the website are neatly sidelined. There is no way to discuss what is there in the list and whether this helps or harms the user. This is a one way water hose, the information from which has to be carefully cross examined elsewhere. Often (as in the case of internet marking software), BS is way way beyond what is reasonable. As a result you may not find any negative opinions for the first five pages of a search engine result. You have to really deep-dive in the topic, visit a lot of internet markets forums and find out by yourself
• You can share silly information and disguise it as a thorough professional quality work. People click on something that is "free for 10 days", "free only for the loyal subscribers of the lists", "free for idiots", look at something that has been rehashed and resold from a totally unrelated story and get satisfied for the day. This especially builds up the opinion provided the subscribers do not know what a feed reader is and do not know what is going on other than what has been provided in online/offline newspapers, Facebook and the great knowledge repository called Twitter. Read here for an example. I totally agree this is needless here (especially while I have singled out the website somewhere else before), but this was just to show the trend.