Survey of 30 Unsubscription Processes

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I have never declared email bankruptcy but I certainly fell into default.  I've had the same personal email address from NetIdentity for almost a decade, and had 4,725 messages in my In Box, 90% of them unread.  A friend had complained about my sporadic checking of my email, so last night I decided to unsubscribe from many of the mailing lists I had ended up on. 

After unsubscribing from a few, I saw a pattern and started to keep notes.  It turns out that most organizations can do a much better job handling requests to unsubscribe from mailing lists.  For the last 30 mailing lists I unsubscribed from, here's how they handed the process.

• 17% by Email - I found this to be the most annoying method, since it varied for each list.  You have to find a special email address, copy it into a new message, then type "Unsubscribe" or something similar into the subject or body and send it.   I find web forms much more convenient.
• 13% by Instant Link - Click the link from the email and it opens a browser window or tab that tells you that you are unsubscribed.  So quick and convenient it seems anticlimactic!
• 60% by Link to Form - The majority of unsubscribe proccesses require you to change your email preferences on a form, sometimes allowing you to opt out of different categories of email.  This struck me as a desperate "we can still be friends, right?" plea as I tried to break off the relationship. Despite that, I did appreciate the granularity in a couple instances, where I chose one of the options for receiving rare, important messages, and there were some times when I would have downgraded but couldn't, because the opportunity wasn't offered.
• 10% by Link to Survey - The best unsubscribe forms make it simple to unsubscribe but capture some additional content with a quick survey question.  In each of the three cases, this was an open-ended response, asking why I was leaving.  You wouldn't think you could get asking an open-ended question wrong, but one unsubscription form had a single-line text box that was too short, and one had a multi-line text box that counted down some arbitrary character limit as I typed, as if each additional letter was an imposition.  Apparently, hard-drive costs are soaring for this particular company.

Obviously, this is a qualitative assessment of unsubscriptions, not a quantitative assessment.  The mailing lists I ended up on were not randomly chosen and therefore are not representative of mailing lists in general.  In my case, the list was made up of retailers, etailers, web services and charities I supported once at some coworkers' request. Your mileage may vary.

Still, from this quick survey I think most organizations can do a better job handling unsubscription requests.  Some suggestions:

• Let the reader opt out of some but not all channels of communication - List the available types of mailings and the current email settings.  A couple forms gave a bullet list of the different types of messages I would no longer be receiving; I would have opted in to one or two, but didn't want all the email they were currently sending.
  • Offer a separate channel for "Feedback Surveys" -  That wasn't available as a channel in any of the 18 web forms I used. There were a few vendors for whom I would have taken surveys, even though I didn't want to get their marketing messages anymore. Surveys are targeted emails, and I imagine people would keep receiving these. It's worth asking them.
  • Offer a separate channel for snail mail - I figure if people are willing to spend money to mail me something, I'm open to reading it.  I checked this box on a couple forms, but it was rarely offered.
• Ask them why they are unsubscribing! - Since they are already at a form, you might as well ask them a survey question. 
  • Make it short and sweet. "Why are you unsubscribing?"  Don't be longwinded, like these real examples:
    • "To better serve readers in the future, we would like to know your reasons for unsubscribing."
    • "Please take a moment to let us know the most significant reason you have requested not to receive further promotional e-mail communications from [us]. Your comments will help ensure we provide timely and relevant messages to our other subscribers."
  • Give them a list of common choices. It's not rocket science why your readers are unsubscribing:  they get too much email in general, you are emailing them too often, and your email messages are not compelling enough.  Chances are if you just ask them an open-ended question you are rarely going to even read all the comments, let alone categorize them.
  • Don't ask them more than one question. If you have multiple questions you want to gather data for, randomly choose which one to ask. Be considerate of your respondent. They are trying to unsubscribe after all, not provide you detailed feedback about your marketing initiatives.

Thanks to this little bit of research I temporarily staved off email bankruptcy, deleting the messages from each vendor as I unsubscribed.  Only 3,212 emails to go!

Update (12/17/08): Three survey templates for unsubscription