That unsubscribe time of year

Like many people, I make purchases online. This usually means the vendor adds me to their mailing list. I normally don’t care, that mail all filters to my “commercial” folder (my own personal version of tabs) and I can browse it at my leisure.
At this time of year, though, email marketers go into a bit of overdrive and that folder fills with 20 – 30 or more emails a day. The volume is no so much of a problem, but it can get annoying to try and find mail I want in all the crud from random vendors.
In some cases, I don’t even know who the company is or why they have my address. Today’s example was a florist in Maryland. Eventually I figured out I’d purchased from them back in 2007 to send flowers to a colleague when her mother passed away. Apparently, they’re doing so badly they need every dollar they can find.
What it does mean, though, is that I unsubscribe from more mail in December than I do through the rest of the year. I don’t mind the occasional mail, even weekly is no big deal. But when that frequency drastically increases, or someone has not bothered to mail me for 5+ years, I just don’t want that mail anymore.
Dana Perino used the term ‘unsubscribe Tuesday‘

Yesterday was Cyber Monday & today is Unsubscribe Tuesday.Take a chill, marketers!.

For me, that Tuesday is extending into all of December.

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Don't unsubscribe from spam!!

Having been around the email and anti-spam industry for a while, I’ve just about seen and heard it all. In fact, sometimes I’ve been around for the beginning of the myth.
One myth that seems to never actually go away is “unsubscribing just confirms you’re a real address and your address will get sold and your spam load will explode.” This is related but orthogonal to “spammers harvest addresses out of unsubscribe forms.” The reality is that both of these things used to be true. Unsubscribing would confirm your email address and increase your spam load. Spammers would harvest addresses out of unsubscribe forms.
But neither of these things have really been true for the last decade.
I have had clients over the years that are spammers. Some of the are names that you probably would recognize. Some of them are companies we could probably all agree are spammers.  Some of them are buying addresses from companies that are spammers. Some of them are companies that have a good mailing program here and then hire snowshoers over there. Sometimes they come to me claiming to be real mailers “with minor delivery problems.” Sometimes they come to me saying that a blocklist has recommended they talk to me about repairing their processes. Sometimes they even actually want to fix things. Sometimes they’re just looking to say that I’ve given them a clean bill of health (which is not something I do).
What that means is that I have lots of addresses on lots of spammer lists. Not just the ones they’ve found, but ones I’ve used to test their systems. I use tagged or disposable addresses for everything. Some of my disposable accounts are only marginally connected to me as I want to see what senders really do for their subscribers rather than what they want me to think they do. The ones I add to their system I use to test their subscription process as well as their unsubscription process.
I have never encountered a situation where unsubscribing one of those addresses caused a “multiplication” (to quote one anti-spammer) of my spam load.
I’ve had cases where my clients have ignored unsubscribes. I’ve had cases where my clients have decided years later to add me to their list again. I’ve had cases where they’ve been bought out and my address has been reactivated by the new owners. I’ve had cases where months or even years of 5xx responses was ignored. I’ve seen just about every bad bit of behavior on behalf of spammers. But I’ve never actually had unsubscribing increase my spam load.
It doesn’t matter how often people demonstrate unsubscribing doesn’t result in more spam in the current email ecosystem. (Ken Magill 2013, NYTimes 2011, dayah.com 2009). It doesn’t matter that many mailers treat “this is spam” button hits the same way they handle unsubscribe requests. The myth still persists.
 
 

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Does mail volume contribute to blocking?

There are two extreme opinions I see among marketing agencies and email senders when it comes to volume.
One group seems to think that volume alone triggers blocks. Another group thinks volume never affects delivery.
As with many things in delivery reality is at neither extreme.
Sending lots of mail isn’t the problem. Sending lots of mail your recipients aren’t interested in getting is the problem. Last year during the US political elections the Obama campaign, for instance, sent lots and lots of mails. Their list was an order of magnitude larger than the Romney campaign and there were days they were sending 10s of mails per subscriber. It was a deluge. But they were smart, and they did a lot of data mining and they did it in a way that got recipients to act on the mail. That mail was a deluge, but it was a wanted deluge by most of the receivers.
For a lot of vendors, too, increasing volume does increase response and revenue and all the things you want to drive with email marketing. But there will be people who don’t like the increase in volume. If they’re not valuable customers, no great loss. If they are valuable customers, then the increase in volume may drive a decrease in revenue.
In terms of inbox delivery, it’s not the volume it’s how wanted the mail is. Send wanted, interesting and engaging mail, you can send dozens of times a day.
No, volume alone doesn’t contribute to delivery problems.

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Bad unsubscribe processes

We recently renewed our support contract with VMWare. It’s a weirdly complicated system, in that we can’t buy directly from VMWare, but have to buy through one of their resellers. In this case, we purchased the original hardware from Dell, so we renewed our contract through Dell.
Dell sends my email address over to VMWare as part of the transaction.
My only role in this is as CFO. I approve the purchase and pay the bill. I don’t do anything technical with the license.
The email failures start when VMWare decides that I need to receive mail about some user group meetings they’re holding all over the US. First off, I’m not the right person to be sending this mail to inside our company. I’m the billing contact, not the user contact. Then, they send me mail about meetings all over the US, when they know exactly where I’m located. Would it be so hard to do a semi-personalized version that highlighted the meetings in my local area then pointing out the other locations? Apparently, yes, it is so hard.
The biggest failures, though are in the unsubscribe process.
unsubscribe option
The unsubscribe page is no big deal. I get to unsub from all VMWare communications, and submit that request without having to figure out what my VMWare password is or anything.
After I hit submit, I’m taken to this page.
VMWareThank you
Wait? What?
“Thank you for registering?” I didn’t register! I don’t want you to contact me. Plus, this is a HP co-branded page when I’m not a customer of HP. VMWare knows this, they know they got my address from Dell.
The biggest problem is that I’m not sure that my address was actually unsubscribed. I suspect that someone copied a form from elsewhere on the site to use as an unsubscribe form. This person forgot to change the link after the “submit” button was clicked. But what else did they forget to change? Is the unsubscribe actually registered in the database?
I suppose only time will tell if VMWare actually processed my unsubscribe. If they didn’t they’re technically in violation of CAN SPAM.
The lesson, though, is someone should check unsubscribe forms. Someone in marketing should own the unsubscribe process, and that includes confirming that unsubscribe pages work well enough.

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