Unsubscribe Processes: A Review of 63 Unsubscription Attempts
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Dec 24, 2010
Every December, in a desperate attempt to start the New Year with an empty inbox, I unsubscribe from the many mailing lists I’ve been added to in the previous twelve months. And I keep track of the type of unsubscribe processes I encounter:
The above chart is from the 50 unsubscribes I completed yesterday and shows little change from 2009. Note: the mailing lists I ended up on were not randomly chosen and therefore are not representative of mailing lists in general.
Some years I’ve seen some creative unsubscribe surveys but not this year. Of the six surveys I found, three were from MailChimp:
The other three “surveys” simply provided text boxes for the subscriber to make a comment. I still think a short survey, placed after confirmation that the user has been unsubscribed, can provide valuable feedback to help you improve the quality of your mailings.
The unsubscription best practice most rarely followed is letting users unsubscribe from one channel of communication while still receiving email requests for feedback: only 1 of the 50 processes listed channels, and it did not list a channel for surveys.
Not included in my analysis were 13 emails where the unsubscription process wasn’t available: 8 emails mentioned no way to unsubscribe (a violation of the CAN-SPAM act?) and 5 had broken links. Clearly, no one is quality checking that unsubscription works.
If you can make one change to your unsubscription process for 2011, make sure you’re your marketing department’s email campaigns don’t reduce your ability to survey customers and prospects: have a separate communications channel listed for feedback. Otherwise you are reducing the representativeness of your house mailing lists.
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