Unsubscribing From Newsletters: Heroes and Villains

If you have a newsletter or mailing list it can be hard to recruit subscribers. You have to have something really special to offer people in order for them to allow you to email them regularly.

After all that work it can be very down-heartening to see your users requesting to leave your mailing list. After all, it is potentially a good way to appeal to repeat customers and inform them of any special offers and new products you have available. When they want to leave there is a temptation to make it very, very difficult for them to do so. My advice for you today is one word: don’t.

It is entirely unacceptable to put obstacles in the way of people unsubscribing. In certain countries there are also laws dictating how the process must work and time limits for removing email address from your database. Unfortunately, only the laws of the country where the sender lives can be enforced. So if you live in a different country, your options may be limited.

I took a look through my Google Mail archive today to unsubscribe from all the mailing lists I am on that I don’t really use any more. We will take a look at the unsubscribe process for each and give it a rating out of 10.

First up is Catalink, a company that sends you catalogues about various topics you are interested in. This is what their unsubscribe link looks like in the email.

The unsubscribe link seemed pretty standard, a small link at the bottom of the mail telling me to log into my account and unsubscribe from there. No direct link to unsubscribe, but that isn’t unusual. Now let’s take a look at removing ourselves from the lists. After you log into your account you will find a list like this.

I was absolutely amazed by the inconvenience of this page. In order to unsubscribe, you have to check the box, select a reason and click “Unsubscribe” for each newsletter. So for the eight newsletters in this example, I had to repeat the process eight times. This is entirely unacceptable and a clear attempt at trying to make us stay by making the removal process too much work. They obviously think that we won’t bother repeating the process so we will end up staying subscribed.

To add insult to injury they also state at the bottom that it can take a month to be “fully unsubsribed from our system.” What that means I really don’t know. Will you receive emails for a month after unsubscribing?

Convenience rating (out of 10; 1 being bad and 10 being good) 1/10.

Making us log into our account is one thing, but making us unsubscribe from our newsletters one at a time is entirely unacceptable, as is making us wait a month to be “fully unsubscribed.”.

EDIT: Catalink have taken the time to respond to my words and have posted in the comments below. They explain that they do have other unsubscribing mechanisms and an “unsubscribe from all” feature in the pipeline. Since the rating I posted is based on my experience, the score will stand as it is. However, I am always willing to take a look at it again when the changes have been made.

The next service we will look at is Prospects, a website for recent graduatess looking for jobs and training course. As with Catalink, they tell you to log into your account a find the unsubscribe option there. It is quite easy to find and the unsubscribe page is simple and straightforward.

They have multiple newsletters but there is an option to remove yourself from them all at once, which is an essential feature for multiple newsletters.

Convenience rating 5/10.

The next list we are unsubscribing from is an ab builder affiliate newsletter. It uses a commercial email network call Get Response. Since emailing people is what their business is all about I was expecting some very good unsubscribe options from this company. I was not disappointed. There is a very straightforward and direct message at the bottom of the email, “To unsubscribe or to change your contact details, visit…” Visiting this link took us to this page.

By clicking a single link we are unsubscribed. No having to log into an account. We didn’t even have to click a confirmation button. There is even an option to resubscribe if we have left the list by mistake.

While the praise here is probably more due to the mailing company than the people who send the newsletter, I was still very impressed.

Convenience rating 10 out of 10.

Our next company is Tool Station, a UK based equipment and machine supplier. The message at the bottom of their email looks like this.

This is another website that requires us to log into our account. Unfortunately there is no direct link to our account page so we have to follow the link to the homepage. All these steps just to remove us from a newsletter.

Convenience rating 4

The final company we will be looking at is ING Direct, a Dutch bank that is one of the world’s biggest. They send out marketing emails to their customers but they are not very frequent. This is part of the text displayed at the bottom of each email.

Not exactly convenient. We all know that people are much less likely to unsubscribe from something if you have to speak to a person to do it. That’s why all those free month trial offers that make you ring the company to cancel your trial are so successful. It seems entirely unnecessary to require customers to do this and it is a blatant attempt to stop people unsubscribing.

Convenience rating 2 out of 10

So What Have We Learned?

The first thing we have learned is that if some of these companies were located in the USA, they would be breaking the law. The US CAN-SPAM Act gives several key requirements:

• Subject lines cannot mislead about the contents of the email,
• Recipients must be given a web-based method of removing themselves from the mailing list, and
• Unsubscribe requests must be honoured within 10 days.

While most of the companies looked at today are outside the USA, most of them failed on at least one of the above points. While they may not be laws in certain countries, they are not exactly unreasonable requests.

If a customer or visitor has requested to leave your newsletter, they are already lost. At least make the process as easy as possible and your company can escape with some reputation in tact.

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