Now I’m very familiar with AWeber, and there are many things I’ve tested to lower unsubscribe rates (the number of newsletter recipients who unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the email message). AWeber appends the unsubscribe link automatically to each email along with the publisher’s physical address (as you can sort of see in the image), and it’s the marketer’s job to make sure as few as possible people click on that link. That means creating awesome content, giving the user something useful for free, making sure they click on links inside the email rather than unsubscribing, etc. Or bumping the unsubscribe link so far down the page that the user doesn’t find it.

In the past I’ve tried things like inserting a series of spaces after the signature to bump down the link so it’s not visible within the frame of the content. Well, I guess it’s technically a no-no since email spam filters deem those techniques as spammy. The way to check this previously would be to include the spaces in AWeber and then check the SpamAssassin rating within AWeber. To do this, you would go into your Messages tab and view the rating under the “Spam?” link. The higher the number, the more likely the email is to be caught in a spam filter and not delivered to the inbox. It says to keep it under 5 but my recommendation is to try to keep it under 2.0.

AWeber has updated their system so it’s no longer possible to just leave spaces after the end of the message. It automatically deletes the lines that are spaces only. Therefore I’m guessing this publisher figured the way around it was to include miniscule text (i.e. dashes) after the content so it would still bump the link down. I went into AWeber and tested this. After adding the dashes below the end of the content, and checking the SpamAssassin filter, it still shows a rating of 0.

Not bad, huh? Sneaky! Now, I’m not condoning the use of tactics like this, only pointing out my observations. There are ways to lower your unsubscribe rate by improving your formatting, creating unique and useful content, and including relevant and highly clickable links. I would think that a technique like the above would still successfully get the email to the inbox, but it might have an effect of confusing the user, which isn’t such a great idea. If you do test out new tactics like this that don’t have detrimental affects to your users and also reduce your unsubscribe rates, then good for you. It’s all about finding what works.

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