Check what now?

A client sent me a shot of a page where they were attempting to change their preferences at a website. This is one of my long time clients, and someone who has been in email marketing for years. He tells me that he spent quite a long time staring at the screen trying to figure out what he was supposed to do to opt out.

What would you click?
I hesitate to say that intentionally make it difficult for recipients to opt-out, but there are days when I’m overly cynical about what I am seeing. On those very cynical days I think that it has to either be on purpose or incompetence.
On normal days, I attribute it to aggressive wordsmithing by marketers who are looking for the very best way to sell their product. One of the things I do for clients is actually review their opt-in and opt-out language, looking for confusion and looking at their websites with the eye of someone who hasn’t been in planning meetings and internal discussions. I do sign up and then unsubscribe from their lists, and give them feedback on the process. In most cases there isn’t a problem, but occasionally there is a weird turn of phrase or an unsub process that’s broken.
Unsubscribes should be simple, and the wording should be clear enough not to confuse a long time email marketer. What’s the wording like on your unsubscribe pages?
 

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Clicktracking link abuse

If you use redirection links in the emails you send out, where a click on the link goes to your server – so you can record that someone clicked – before redirecting to the real destination, then you’ve probably already thought about how they can be abused.
Redirection links are simple in concept – you include a link that points to your webserver in email that you send out, then when recipients click on it they end up at your webserver. Instead of displaying a page, though, your webserver sends what’s called a “302 redirect” to send the recipients web browser on to the real destination. How does your webserver know where to redirect to? There are several different ways, with different tradeoffs:

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Persistence of unsubscribes

It’s really, really frustrating when an unsubscribe request doesn’t take. And it happens a lot more than many people expect.
Most of the culprits are marketing companies. United Business Media is a huge problem, for instance. I never even signed up for their mail, but they bought an address I’d used to register for a conference. I unsubscribed at least a dozen times, but the mail kept coming. Of course, it wasn’t actually mail I’d unsubscribed from. Every email was part of a different list.
There was no way to find out what lists I was on through their unsubscribe page and preemptively unsubscribe. I tried mailing their privacy department, but it took multiple emails to get any sort of response. Finally, someone responded that they had removed me from all their lists.
Illegal? Probably not. Annoying? Totally.
This is the reason I don’t unsubscribe from mail if I don’t recognize the sender. Too many people who “acquire” my email address without permission don’t actually pay any attention to the law, much less best practices.
The other time I see this problem is with some of the addresses I’ve used for testing customers and their vendors. I unsub from any lists I’ve signed up for when I’ve collected the information I need. It’s not totally unheard of, though, for those addresses to lay dormant for years and then start receiving mail again.
This is a problem. They’re “reactivating” addresses. Again, they’re probably different “lists” so it’s not a CAN SPAM violation, but I don’t really care. I unsubscribed. I don’t want any more of that mail. I really can’t figure out what possesses companies to just decide, after not having interaction with subscribers for years, that the right thing to do is just add those addresses to a new list.
It’s not even like they try and re-engage me. Or ask me to opt-in. All they do is start sending me copies of the Annoying Meme of the Hour newsletter. It’s even more frustrating because I know that the sender has been exposed to best practices. I have spent anywhere from weeks to months helping them create a email marketing program that shouldn’t do this kind of thing.
I’ve tried talking to some clients after this happens. Usually, the issue is the marketers or IT staff that I worked with are gone. A new, shiny marketing group has moved in and decided that they had this huge database and of COURSE they should mail it, all of it, opt-outs notwithstanding.
It happens to me as a consumer and subscriber, too. In those cases I don’t have much recourse beyond reporting it as spam and blocking the mail. I don’t trust that a new unsubscribe will work, since the last one didn’t. I have to take other steps to make the mail stop.
In this case, I am much less persistent than the sender is. I think it would be better if senders actually believed me when I said I didn’t want their mail. But I don’t expect that will ever happen. Too many senders think they know better.

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Have you audited your program lately?

A few months ago, I got spammed by a major brand. I know their ESP takes abuse seriously, so I sent a note into their abuse desk. It bounced with a 550 user unknown. I sent another note into a different abuse address, it bounced. I sent mail into their corporate HQ, it disappeared into a black hole. I eventually connected with their delivery person and he’d not seen hide nor hair of any complaint. Their entire abuse handling system had broken down and no one noticed.
In the recent past, I was dealing with a client’s SBL listing. We were talking about how their fairly clean subscription process ended up with multiple Spamhaus spamtraps on the list. They mentioned bounce handling, and that they’d not been correctly managing bounces for some period of time. Their bounce handling system was broken and no one noticed.
Last year, I was working with another client. They were looking at why some subscribers were complaining about unsubscribes not taking. A bit of poking at different forms and they realized that one of their old templates pointed to an old website. Their unsubscription form had broken and no one noticed.
Another client insisted that their engagement handling removed any addresses that didn’t open or click on mail. But after ignoring their mail for 6 months, they still hadn’t stopped mailing me. Their engagement handling was broken and no one noticed.
Periodic monitoring would have caught all of these things before they became a big enough problem to result in a Spamhaus listing, or recipient complaints, or lawsuits for failure to honor CAN SPAM. Unfortunately, many companies don’t check to make sure their internal processes are working very often.
Email marketing is not set and forget. You need to monitor what is happening. You need to make sure that your processes are still in place and things are still working.

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