Unsubscribe preference centers

I unsubscribe from a lot of opt-in lists around this time of year. I’m generally unbothered by a couple emails a week from companies I’ve purchased from in the past. But, a lot of these companies drastically increase their volume mid-November. I may not be averse to 3 emails a week, but that absolutely does not mean I want 2 emails a day.

unsubformfail
Nice that they’re telling me all the lists I’m subscribed to, but I don’t need that much information about their segmentation practices.
One of those vendors presented me with one of the absolute silliest unsub pages I’ve seen.
Their practices are good. They are segmenting lists by purchase date, so they can mail people based on when they last purchased. That’s good. But they don’t need to present that information to everyone who unsubscribes. This may be a limitation of their ESP process, in that they have to have “lists” rather than a single database that can be segmented. But in any case, this is not really an ideal preference page.

Related Posts

TWSD: Don't honor opt-outs

One of the big arguments various mailers make is that they make it easy for users to opt-out of mail, so it’s not a big deal. Users who don’t want to receive the mail, can make it stop. This was one of the guiding principles of CAN SPAM. The sender can make the decision to send mail to any recipient but they have to offer an opt-out.
The problem is there are a lot of major companies out there that don’t honor opt-outs. Since earlier this year I’ve been tracking when I opt-out of mail. Why? Because I kept getting the feeling that I’d opted out of mail before, but kept getting it.
The good(?) news is that it wasn’t my imagination, some of these companies aren’t honoring their opt-outs. The bad news is that major companies are not honoring opt-outs.

Read More

Unsubscribing from spam, part 2

Yesterday I posted about why the reasons a lot of people give for not unsubscribing from spam are mostly wrong. Unsubscribing from spam doesn’t seem to confirm your address and it doesn’t seem to increase your spam load.
But does that mean you should unsubscribe from spam? I’m not sure about that.
I’ve been working on a project where I am unsubscribing from every message coming into one of my email addresses. Weeks into that process I’m not seeing a huge decrease in the amount of mail that address is receiving. In some cases I’m unsubscribing from the same senders multiple times a day and have been for close to 3 weeks.
While unsubscribing doesn’t increase your spam, I’m also not sure it decreases your spam, either. But I’ll have full data and numbers demonstrating that in a few more weeks.
What can have an effect on the amount of spam you get is complaining about spam, at least according to Brian Krebs.

Read More

How to devalue your mailing lists

This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam.
Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged address that I only gave to Adobe. Sure enough, it’s Adobe and ESPN co-branded spam about college basketball sent to an Adobe list.
Down at the bottom of the email there’s a blob of tiny illegible text, in very pale grey on white. Buried in there is an opt-out link: “If you’d prefer not to receive e-mail like this from Adobe in the future, please click here to unsusbscribe“.
I’d prefer not to receive college sports spam from anyone, including Adobe, so I click on it and find a big empty white webpage with this in the middle of it:

Read More