As Rafat Ali points out in his excellent e-mail newsletter (well it would be woulnd’t it), e-mail’s still got it. You can read his post yourself, but it’s interesting what Jeff DeBalko (ex-eLogic) says in the BtoBOnline article.

In fact, we’ve been unsubscribing (non-)readers (those that don’t open e-mails regularly) at Economist.com for years (which is what Prescott Shibles, VP-online development/new media at Prism Business Media says they do in the article, but a bit more agressively).

I suppose, though, that you need to know what you’re trying to do with your e-mail newsletters in the first place. Economist.com have two types (as do many others) - one that can be read and makes sense by itself with the other encouraging click-throughs to the main site to get the full story.

The first of these could live as a commercial product by itself (with paying advertisers) whilst the second is essentially a traffic-driver or value-add (as with the WSJ alerts). You wouldn’t want to unsubscribe someone from alerts if they are designed to be useful without the need to even open them.

But I guess that’s obvious.