Mailing list hygiene and email sending practices have a large impact on your unsubscribe rate. People unsubscribe when they're not interested in receiving your emails, so to reduce this you should focus on:

Contact engagement - Find out whether your contacts are interested in your emails, and what else they're interested in. 

Mailing list pruning - Regular list cleanup and maintenance will help you avoid sending emails to uninterested people who may unsubscribe at any time.

Zoho Marketing Automation provides you with plenty of tools to help combat unsubscribes. Here's a list of what you can do and what to avoid to reduce your unsubscribe rate.

Targeting contacts based on their interests depends on:

Email content plays a major role in engaging your contacts, and with good contact engagement, you can reduce your unsubscribe rate.

A considerable amount of unsubscribes are due to irrelevant content. Dynamic content allows you to send personalized emails which will appeal more to your contacts.

With list segmentation, you can classify your contacts based on their interests and target them with relevant emails they're more likely to read. 

To learn how to segment your mailing list, click here.

People who don't respond (no email opens in the last six months) to your emails can be considered uninterested contacts, and are likely to unsubscribe from your mailing list soon. So send them win-back campaigns (re-engagement emails) to retain some of the interested ones. 

With Zoho Marketing Automation's Contact Scoring, you can set scores for your contacts and classify them based on their responses. 

To learn more about Contact Scoring and Classification, click here.

Zoho Marketing Automation's journey tool helps you engage better with your recipients. Journeys allow you to categorize contacts based on their behavior and information, then perform various actions. To learn more about journeys, click here.

Schedule your campaigns to reach your contacts at the time they're most likely to open it by selecting SEND LATER at Optimal open time. The optimal open time for each recipient will be calculated based on past open time pattern at the scheduled date, time and timezone you've set. The recipients will be grouped for sending the campaigns at different time intervals within next 24 hours. 

To learn how to set email limits to avoid bombarding contacts' inboxes, click here. 

If your contacts opt out because of a flooded inbox, ask them if they'd like to receive your content on platforms other than email, such as SMS, RSS, social media, or blogs. 

Segment idle contacts (no opens in the last six months) and send them win-back campaigns. Retain only the interested contacts and remove the others from your mailing list. This helps you target contacts who're actually interested in your emails and boost your business returns.