Email retention after rolling out ‘Manage Subscriptions’ in Gmail | MarTech

When Gmail rolled out the new Manage Subscriptions feature last summer, we knew it would have an impact, especially for brands that didn’t focus on segmentation and automated journeys and instead peppered users with frequent messages without personalization.

Six months later, the impact is greater than we expected. Unsubscribe rates have increased by 50% to 150% on average across our portfolio accounts, although we see trends and positive impacts that make us optimistic about healthy email performance going forward. Let’s start with what we’ve seen in customer accounts.

How the impact of Manage Subscriptions has unfolded

“Clean up your inbox with Gmail’s newest feature” was the subject of a July 8, 2025 post blog post from Google introducing Manage Subscriptions. We expected a spike in unsubscribes during the initial rollout, followed by a decline as users moved on and forgot about the functionality.

In our customer accounts, we saw a significant spike in email unsubscribes starting in July, peaking in August. Unsubscribes have fallen since then, but customer numbers remain high compared to pre-launch levels.

Despite the optimistic tone of Google’s announcement, the feature was rolled out quietly and users were not prompted to use it, so we didn’t expect this feature to see widespread adoption after an early surge.

Gmail also occasionally promotes one-click unsubscribe in the Promotions tab, so it initially didn’t seem likely that this would lead to a significant spike. The difference now is scale, because Manage Subscriptions centralizes the experience in a way that previous directions didn’t.

How to limit the impact of Manage Subscriptions

Our advice from the start – and we’ve seen it pay off in slowing unsubscribe rates for both new and existing customers since the feature launched – was:

• Use segmentation to deliver personalized messages.
• Monitor campaign frequency closely and be especially wary of over-sending to the wrong subscriber segments, such as less engaged audiences.
• Continue to prioritize users who engage with your brand and content.
• Meet subscribers where they are by investing in progressive profiling and automating personalized emails based on lifecycle stage.
• Use action-driven automated emails tied to user engagement so messages feel useful and relevant.

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What we see on the horizon

First, the relatively bad news: We expect additional spikes in unsubscribes around major shopping holidays like Labor Day, Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday, and Christmas, when subscribers receive an influx of marketing emails from multiple brands. Be prepared with a proactive strategy around these peak periods and ensure retention goals reflect the reality of increased email fatigue.

Now for the more optimistic outlook: This shift will push many email marketers to be more disciplined around segmentation, frequency, and automated personalization, which is ultimately a positive. On a tactical level, unsubscribing is preferable to spamming complaints or repeatedly messaging users who don’t want to hear from you. The overall health of the program shouldn’t decline if you primarily push off low-engagement subscribers.

While this feature may put pressure on CRM numbers in the short term, it should ultimately validate and accelerate a more strategic approach to email marketing.