For those who are still sending out emails to people via a mailing list, whether for a newsletter or promotional emails, Google’s Gmail has just made it that much easier for people to unsubscribe from those emails.

Google is now making changes to that the “unsubscribe” link – a link many marketers hide at the very bottom of an email newsletter, in tiny font, and usually after a good chunk of unrelated text.  Now, Gmail will push an unsubscribe link to the very top of the email newsletter, even when marketers try and hide it at the bottom.  The link will appear right next to the sender’s name and email address.

This change has been testing for quite some time – I personally have seen it on some emails for quite some time (and apologies to the newsletter owner of the newsletter I tried the “unsubscribe” link on).

Here is a promotional email I received from Starbucks today, showing the new unsubscribe link:

The added link is pretty unobtrusive – if it was located at the top of the body of the email message, it would not go over well with email marketers at all.  But if people know where to look for it – and they want to unsubscribe to the newsletter – they can do it pretty easily.

The second unsubscribe link remains at the footer of the email remains, lost amidst the sea of tiny text (11 lines worth) at the bottom of the email.

Gmail had been testing easier ways for users to unsubscribe from newsletters, and this new change should hopefully prevent all the false spam reportings sent in by those who were just too lazy to unsubscribe the usual way from a newsletter or promotional emails that they did legitimately sign up for in the first place.  So while you may get a higher unsubscribe rate, your false positives to Gmail users should decrease, meaning your emails will be less likely to end up in the spam folder instead of merely the promotions tab.