Check what now?

A client sent me a shot of a page where they were attempting to change their preferences at a website. This is one of my long time clients, and someone who has been in email marketing for years. He tells me that he spent quite a long time staring at the screen trying to figure out what he was supposed to do to opt out.

What would you click?
I hesitate to say that intentionally make it difficult for recipients to opt-out, but there are days when I’m overly cynical about what I am seeing. On those very cynical days I think that it has to either be on purpose or incompetence.
On normal days, I attribute it to aggressive wordsmithing by marketers who are looking for the very best way to sell their product. One of the things I do for clients is actually review their opt-in and opt-out language, looking for confusion and looking at their websites with the eye of someone who hasn’t been in planning meetings and internal discussions. I do sign up and then unsubscribe from their lists, and give them feedback on the process. In most cases there isn’t a problem, but occasionally there is a weird turn of phrase or an unsub process that’s broken.
Unsubscribes should be simple, and the wording should be clear enough not to confuse a long time email marketer. What’s the wording like on your unsubscribe pages?
 

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Persistence of unsubscribes

It’s really, really frustrating when an unsubscribe request doesn’t take. And it happens a lot more than many people expect.
Most of the culprits are marketing companies. United Business Media is a huge problem, for instance. I never even signed up for their mail, but they bought an address I’d used to register for a conference. I unsubscribed at least a dozen times, but the mail kept coming. Of course, it wasn’t actually mail I’d unsubscribed from. Every email was part of a different list.
There was no way to find out what lists I was on through their unsubscribe page and preemptively unsubscribe. I tried mailing their privacy department, but it took multiple emails to get any sort of response. Finally, someone responded that they had removed me from all their lists.
Illegal? Probably not. Annoying? Totally.
This is the reason I don’t unsubscribe from mail if I don’t recognize the sender. Too many people who “acquire” my email address without permission don’t actually pay any attention to the law, much less best practices.
The other time I see this problem is with some of the addresses I’ve used for testing customers and their vendors. I unsub from any lists I’ve signed up for when I’ve collected the information I need. It’s not totally unheard of, though, for those addresses to lay dormant for years and then start receiving mail again.
This is a problem. They’re “reactivating” addresses. Again, they’re probably different “lists” so it’s not a CAN SPAM violation, but I don’t really care. I unsubscribed. I don’t want any more of that mail. I really can’t figure out what possesses companies to just decide, after not having interaction with subscribers for years, that the right thing to do is just add those addresses to a new list.
It’s not even like they try and re-engage me. Or ask me to opt-in. All they do is start sending me copies of the Annoying Meme of the Hour newsletter. It’s even more frustrating because I know that the sender has been exposed to best practices. I have spent anywhere from weeks to months helping them create a email marketing program that shouldn’t do this kind of thing.
I’ve tried talking to some clients after this happens. Usually, the issue is the marketers or IT staff that I worked with are gone. A new, shiny marketing group has moved in and decided that they had this huge database and of COURSE they should mail it, all of it, opt-outs notwithstanding.
It happens to me as a consumer and subscriber, too. In those cases I don’t have much recourse beyond reporting it as spam and blocking the mail. I don’t trust that a new unsubscribe will work, since the last one didn’t. I have to take other steps to make the mail stop.
In this case, I am much less persistent than the sender is. I think it would be better if senders actually believed me when I said I didn’t want their mail. But I don’t expect that will ever happen. Too many senders think they know better.

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What not to do

There’s a London concert promoter that’s been spamming our old sales address for 5 or 6 years now. I’ve sent in complaints, I’ve tried to unsubscribe, and the mail still keeps coming. They managed to get through my filters, again, this morning. In a fit of frustration I tweeted about how frustrated I was that they would not stop spamming me.
Well, that got someone’s attention. The person managing their twitter account tweeted at me with an email address and a suggestion to send him my address so he could take care of it. I sent the mail as asked and even got a reply.
Unfortunately, the reply was “I clicked the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message for you.”
I dunno, maybe his mouse is a magic mouse and, somehow, the click from that magic mouse will be more effective than a click from my not-magic mouse. I’m not holding out much hope, though. I have no doubt that my sales address will keep getting invited to raves in London long after I retire.
 

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Leaving money on the table

On August 1 two domains in the Netherlands are going away: wanadoo.nl and orange.nl. Current users of these domains are being transitioned to new addresses at online.nl. Mailchimp has more information and links.
This is a good time for all of us to consider how easy it is for a subscriber to change their address of record. Some senders just have the subscriber unsubscribe from one address and resubscribe for another. This sounds like the simplest way to do things, and it certainly doesn’t take much engineering effort.
But what information do you lose by simply asking subscribers to unsubscribe and resubscribe? It depends on what you’re tracking, but you do lose everything that you track. Preferences, interaction history, purchase history, it’s all gone. Providing a simple way to change an email address of record preserves the information related to that subscriber.
For some senders, keeping subscriber information through different ISPs and email addresses will pay for the development of a preference center. For others, there’s no real value there. How much money are companies leaving on the table by not providing a mechanism for recipients to change their email address?

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