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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Does your unsubscribe process work? Are you sure?

I stumbled across an interesting problem today.
A company I bought something from a while back added me to their newsletter. They seem to be having trouble making sales this quarter, as they’ve gone from an occasional email every few weeks to bombarding me with increasingly desperate offers in the past week or two. So I do what most recipients do in that situation (well, the ones who don’t just mark the mail as spam, anyway). I click the unsubscribe link.
I get a perfectly normal, standard unsubscription page, with a nice, prominent “Unsubscribe from all” button with good text explaining that that will remove me from all of the companies mailing lists. No requirements to log in, set dozens of checkboxes or provide a password I don’t have. So far this is a textbook example of a good unsubscription process.
I click the button. Nothing happens. That’s not good.
So I grab one of the people I know over at that ESP and we start looking at it. He clicks the button, and it loads a new page saying that I’ve been unsubscribed from all of the companies mailing lists.
A bit more testing shows that the unsubscription works if you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, but not if you use Safari. The cause of the bug was threefold:

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Fines for not honoring unsubscribes

Virgin Blue has been fined $110,000 by the Australian government for not honoring unsubscribes.

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Leaving money on the table

On August 1 two domains in the Netherlands are going away: wanadoo.nl and orange.nl. Current users of these domains are being transitioned to new addresses at online.nl. Mailchimp has more information and links.
This is a good time for all of us to consider how easy it is for a subscriber to change their address of record. Some senders just have the subscriber unsubscribe from one address and resubscribe for another. This sounds like the simplest way to do things, and it certainly doesn’t take much engineering effort.
But what information do you lose by simply asking subscribers to unsubscribe and resubscribe? It depends on what you’re tracking, but you do lose everything that you track. Preferences, interaction history, purchase history, it’s all gone. Providing a simple way to change an email address of record preserves the information related to that subscriber.
For some senders, keeping subscriber information through different ISPs and email addresses will pay for the development of a preference center. For others, there’s no real value there. How much money are companies leaving on the table by not providing a mechanism for recipients to change their email address?

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