Opt-out
The person can stop your marketing email easily — and you must honour it.
Say it out loud
“The unsubscribe. It has to be easy, it has to be fast, and it has to apply everywhere we send from.”
Opt-out is the exit. Laws and mailbox providers set how fast you must stop, and they set different clocks: CAN-SPAM allows ten business days, Gmail and Yahoo expect bulk senders to process one-click requests within two. Honouring an opt-out is a separate obligation from whether you needed opt-in to begin with.
You may ask after. Not before, and not as a condition.
A preference centre is fine as long as "all marketing" is one visible click, not four.
Part yours
The platform does part; the rest is genuinely yours.
What goes wrong
Honouring the unsubscribe in the marketing platform but not in the transactional tool, the SMS platform, or the sales sequencer. From the recipient's side it is one brand, and the second message after an unsubscribe is what turns a quiet exit into a complaint.
The dated rules behind this
A definition is not a citation. These are the pages with the primary source, the date it was published, and what to do about it.
See also
Where this sits
Stop 7, a human reacts. Somebody opens, clicks, ignores, unsubscribes, or presses the button that costs you the most.