What? Email marketing and a healthy and growing email list has long been seen as the holy grail of marketing. Email is still important. I’m definitely not denying the importance of keeping in touch with people that way. But I’m here to tell you unsubscribes aren’t something to stress over.

Your own expectations for your growing email list can make any unsubscribe–especially if it’s from someone you know–feel as bad as a romantic breakup. Marketers, and myself included, have told people to closely monitor your email unsubscribes to see if the message you’re producing is reaching people the way you hope it will. I still recommend paying attention to your statistics. But at some point you will realize that you can’t make everyone happy. And trying to make everyone happy and avoid those unsubscribes will bring you down.

You might even consider removing inactive subscribers yourself. If someone hasn’t, say, opened any of your emails for the last 4 months, you can remove them. In the “olden days” many businesses sent out print catalogs. They welcomed having their recipients call to cancel their catalogs, because it meant that they were no longer paying mailing costs to send a catalog to someone who didn’t want it.

Email marketing is so much more cost-effective than that. It may be tempting to think that you’re better off keeping anyone on the list. Not so. Trim the deadwood. Make room for people who really want to hear your message. And email those people. If you are constantly re-evaluating your content and adjusting your messages to try to reach the people who unsubscribe or don’t open your emails, you’re not focusing on the people who really do want your messages.

With all this in mind, everyone on your email list is not the same. Each person who subscribes is at a different point in the “journey” to purchasing your products and services. (Learn more about that here: “The 6 Levels in the Customer Awareness Spectrum) Treat them differently. Mail services are robust enough now that you can easily send a separate message to the people who haven’t bought in six months, or bought yesterday. If you want to try a softer approach before you manually remove someone, you might try a separate re-engagement tactic just for those unresponsive emails. Do that, and don’t sweat the unsubscribes.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to build a brand and maintain regular contact with your customers. You’ve grown your email list and are ready to send out emails on a regular basis. Don’t the things in this following list if you want to keep your emails out of the spam folder.

Add email addresses without their permission.
You know that everybody out there wants your emails whether they’ve opted in or not.

Send too many emails.
As soon as people sign up, send them emails multiple times a day, every day. It’s not annoying at all.

Continue to send emails after people have unsubscribed.
Tell people that you got their unsubscribe request but it will take days to process that request, because email management isn’t automated these days and you have to wait for the carrier pigeon to deliver the message to your assistant, who is on top of a mountain in Timbuktu. They’ll believe it and continue to be patient while getting even more emails they don’t want.

Don’t segment your lists.
If you’re a party planner, for instance, send your corporate events clients the same emails you send to your wedding clients. They’ll love that.

Include broken links.
Assuming your emails actually contain information your customers want, don’t check it before it goes out so that the link to get to your featured product is broken. They’ll definitely keep trying to purchase that product and won’t go to another store with links that actually work.

Include grammar mistakes.
People won’t notice or care that you didn’t take the time to proof your work before you expected them to read it.

Send the same email over and over.
Maybe they didn’t see it the first 10 times you sent it. Send it again.

Send out boring content.
If you don’t have anything useful to say, say it anyway.

Use spammy headlines.
$$$ F R E E 4U * SAV3 MONEY NOW * INCREDIBLE DEAL * OPEN ME!!!
Yeah, that will get their attention.

You wouldn’t actually do these things, would you?

Obviously, we do not recommend doing the things we’ve listed here. Blast out emails to everyone is a bad idea. Emails can help you attract customers, not push them away. Having someone’s email address is a relationship of profound trust. Personalize the email for your audience. Respect that relationship and you’ll keep your email friends on your list and keep your emails out of the spam folder.

A high CTR is a good indication that users find your ads or emails helpful and relevant. You can use CTR to gauge which ads and keywords are successful for you and which need to be improved. Here are 5 ways to increase your click through rate right now.

Whether you’re concerned about click through rates on your paid online advertising or your email open rates, some of the strategies to improve these situations are similar. Click through rates measure often people who see your advertisement click on it. Click through rate on an advertisement is calculated by the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR. For example, if you had 5 clicks and 1000 impressions, then your CTR would be 0.5%. Click through rates can also measure how many people open an email. This click-through rate is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view the email.

Ensure consistent branding.

You don’t want people seeing a totally different color scheme in your emails than they do on your website. Customize all of your branding channels so they are the same, to build trust.

Put a special offer in your headline.

If you’re offering a 30% off sale, put that right up front. Don’t make people click through and read several lines of text to get to the real deal.

Use mobile optimization.

The important parts of your email should look good no matter what device your customers are reading it on.

Use images.

It’s been shown through all kinds of studies of emails, advertisements and social media performance that content with images is shared more frequently and in general interacted with more frequently than content without images.

Use buttons rather than links.

Humans want to click on buttons. When you’re planning out your calls to action, use visible, large, easy to click on buttons rather than links to encourage your customers to take the desired action.

When trying these strategies to increase your click through rate, keep in mind that CTRs vary widely. It can be hard to pin down a good average but once you are paying attention to your numbers you’ll be able to see which ones are poor and which are better. You may also want to see how your click through rate changes if you increase or decrease the frequency of your emails or put in a different keyword in your ads. This kind of testing is the basis of any technique to increase your click through rate.