Check your unsubscribe process

When was the last time you actually tried to unsubscribe from one of your mailing lists? Have you ever even checked to see that your process works?
For whatever reason, unsubscribe processes don’t always work. Sometimes the problem is on the client end. Sometimes the problem is on the ESP end. But in either case, continuing to mail recipients who have attempted to opt-out from your mail is a recipe for disaster.
I mentioned last week about our new mortgage company that can’t process my unsubscribe. Today I contacted their ESP and pointed out I’d tried to unsub a few times, but was still getting mail. The ESP thanked me, pointed out that was not an ESP managed unsubscribe page and did a little digging. A few hours later their delivery guy told me that he saw my multiple unsubscribe attempts (June, July, 2 in August…) and they were all marked as “trashed.”  But he’s going to make sure I’m not mailed any more and follow up with his customer.
Now, there are a lot of reasons this unsub process could have failed. It could be that the website doesn’t handle my tagged addresses well and this is a bank, it’s very possible security is locked down. But that means they shouldn’t have accepted my tagged address in the first place.
There are a couple things to take away from this story.

  1. If you’re a company using your own unsub process, not your ESPs, make sure it works.
  2. Do the same data verification during address collection signup as you do during unsubscription processing.
  3. Test your unsubscription process.

One of my clients has brought me in to deal with problems in their unsubscribe process. In this case, they are a brick and mortar accepting addresses at point of sale. Unfortunately, there was no data verification in their process and one of their customers gave them an address belonging to someone else. This other person works at a large filtering company. To this person’s credit, her first step was to attempt to unsubscribe from the list. When the unsubscription failed, the sender was added to the filtering company’s main filters. This caused all sorts of delivery issues. The company came to me to advise them on fixing their issues and manage the delisting process.
This client discovered that their unsubscribe process was very broken. They worked with their ESP and thought they fixed the unsub problems. I talked to the filtering company and resolved the issue. Unfortunately, a few weeks later my client attempted to email active users and had the same filtering problems as before. In talking with the filtering company, the address mailed was, again, the address that had been unsubscribed.
There are a couple things to take away from this story.

  1. If you’re a company using your ESPs unsubscribe process, make sure it works.
  2. A click on an unsubscribe link is not the same as a click on another link in the email. Don’t count them the same.
  3. Test your unsubscription process.

I know that unsubscribe pages and data integrity are totally unsexy parts of an email marketing program. They’re not what drives revenue, in fact, they’re things that when done well can lower revenue. But they’re vital to the long term health of any email marketing program. Continuing to mail people who don’t want your mail drives up complaints. More complaints result in more delivery problems. Even worse, people who work at filtering companies get mail to. And “spamming employees, not allowing opt-out” is a valid filtering criteria at most places.
Sign up with a new email address at your list this week. Try to opt-out next week. Does it work?

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One Click, Two Click, Red Click, Blue Click

I’ve seen a lot of discussion and arguments over the CAN SPAM rule about whether or not an unsubscribe needs to be a One-Click unsubscribe. It’s gotten so common, I have a stock email I use as a template when wading into such discussions. It’s probably useful for a lot of other people, too, so I thought I’d share.
The regs say:

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Letting people stop transactional mail

The question of putting unsub links on transactional messages came up on multiple lists recently. As with any question that has to do with email and controlling it, there were a lot of different opinions.
A number of people believed that transactional mail should never, ever have an unsubscribe. Their argument was that transactional mail is too valuable to allow recipients to unsubscribe from it.
Other people argued that the recipient should always be able to stop mail and that an unsub link was important, even in transactional mail.
A third group pointed out that under CASL transactional mail to Canadian residents may have to have an unsub link, even if the sender doesn’t want to add one in.
As with most questions, I don’t think there is necessarily a single answer for every mailer or sender.
There are absolutely cases where transactional messages should have an unsubscribe. Twitter notifications and Facebook notifications are just some of the examples of mail a lot of people just want to stop.
But should companies allow recipients to unsubscribe from receipts? Some people feel very, very strongly that recipients should never be allowed to unsubscribe from receipts.
The problem with that stance is it ignores the fact that people don’t always correctly type their email addresses and end up giving the address of another person as part of a purchase. Al found a report at the Consumerist where someone is getting flooded with receipts for Nook books she’s never purchased.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, not by a long shot. In fact, in the past year I negotiated a Spamhaus delisting for a very large company that wasn’t confirming email addresses of their customers. This company sells a service that sends email alerts triggered when certain actions happen. Because they were not confirming their customer’s email addresses, they ended up sending alerts to spamtraps. The alerts triggered a SBL listing.
I don’t think that the Nook owner or the alert purchaser are actually malicious or that they purposely gave the wrong email address to their vendors. But it happens, and it happens not infrequently.
What do I recommend?
Transactional mail that is only ever a single event and where that address is not associated with an account don’t need to have an unsubscribe link. If it’s a one-time email, then it’s OK to not have an opt-out link. It’s OK to have an opt-out link, but not necessary.
Transactional mail that’s associated with some sort of account should have a process in place to make sure that mail is going to the right person and if it’s not, that the wrong person can make the mis-directed mail stop. There are multiple ways to do this. One is to confirm the email address associated with the account during the account creation process. Or you can allow anyone receiving the mail to click on a link and opt-out of receiving mail.
Whatever it is, it needs to be effective and protect everyone involved. Requiring the victim recipient to hand over a bunch of personal information, like Virgin Mobile does, helps no one. Continuing to send purchase receipts to an unrelated third party is poor business practice, particularly when you’ve been informed that this is the wrong person.

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Expectations

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Despite the evidence that correctly setting expectations results in better delivery and higher ROI on lists some senders go out of their way to hide terms from recipients. I’ve heard many of those types of comments over the years.

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