Unsubscription Survey Results & Best Practices
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Dec 11, 2009
As part of my now annual effort at unsubscribing from mailing lists, I wanted to see if organizations were using the process to gather feedback about how to improve their mailings. Most aren't. Only 14% of this year's convenience sample of 50 mailing lists link to a survey in their unsubscription process, compared to 10% last year. Here's the breakdown of types of unsubscription:
- 12% by Email Only - 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. Many mailing lists offer email unsubscribe as a secondary option to a hyperlink.
- 30% by Instant Link - Up dramatically from 13% last year, instant links are so quick and convenient they seem anticlimactic! Click the link from the email, and it opens a web page that tells you that you are successfully unsubscribed ("wait 7 days for processing").
- 44% by Link to Form - Down from 60% last year: The majority of unsubscribe processes require you to change your email preferences on a form, allowing you to opt out of different categories of email about 20% of the time. (Not counting the three forms that listed one email channel in their channel list.)
- 14% 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 seven cases, this was an open-ended response, asking why I was leaving.
Only one out of the 50 mailing lists followed my suggested best practices of providing different mailing channels and asking a follow-up survey question. Most organizations (including Vovici, frankly) 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.
- Offer a separate channel for "Feedback Surveys" - That wasn't available as a channel in any of the 29 web forms I used. For a few of the mailing lists, I would have taken surveys, even though I didn't want to get their marketing messages anymore. Surveys are targeted emails, and I imagine many people would opt to 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 last year, but it wasn't offered on any forms this year.
- Ask them why they are unsubscribing! - Since they are already at a web page, you might as well ask them a survey question.
- Make it short and sweet. "Why are you unsubscribing?" Don't be longwinded, like this real example, "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. If you just ask them an open-ended question you are rarely going to even read all the comments, let alone categorize them. Use the following list or adapt these unsubscribe survey templates from Microsoft, Office Depot and Borders:
- I do not recall subscribing to this email list.
- The email content was not useful to me.
- This specific list sent out too many emails.
- I receive too many emails in general.
- This e-mail address is no longer active.
- Other (please describe your reason in the "Comments" box)
- 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.
If you only make one change to your unsubscription process, give people a separate communications channel for feedback so that you can continue to get input from prospects and customers who don't want to be marketed to.
Caveat: Obviously, my two surveys of unsubscribe processes represent a qualitative survey 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, SaaS sites and newsletters. Your mileage may vary.
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