Unsubscribe preference centers

I unsubscribe from a lot of opt-in lists around this time of year. I’m generally unbothered by a couple emails a week from companies I’ve purchased from in the past. But, a lot of these companies drastically increase their volume mid-November. I may not be averse to 3 emails a week, but that absolutely does not mean I want 2 emails a day.

unsubformfail
Nice that they’re telling me all the lists I’m subscribed to, but I don’t need that much information about their segmentation practices.
One of those vendors presented me with one of the absolute silliest unsub pages I’ve seen.
Their practices are good. They are segmenting lists by purchase date, so they can mail people based on when they last purchased. That’s good. But they don’t need to present that information to everyone who unsubscribes. This may be a limitation of their ESP process, in that they have to have “lists” rather than a single database that can be segmented. But in any case, this is not really an ideal preference page.

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Targeting and Segmentation

MarketingSherpa has a great case study of a retailer that got a 208% higher conversion (purchase) rate for a targeted email sent to a small segment (10%) of their list.

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Logging in to unsubscribe

I have been talking with a company about their unsubscribe process and their placement of all email preferences behind an account login. In the process, I found a number of extremely useful links about the requirements.
The short version is: under the 2008 FTC rulemaking senders cannot require any information other than an email address and an email preference to opt-out of mail. That means senders can’t charge a fee, they can’t ask for personal information and they can’t require a password or a login to unsubscribe.
I’ve talked about requiring a login to unsubscribe in the past here on the Word to the Wise blog.
Let them go
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How not to handle unsubscribes
I’m not the only person, though, that’s written about this.
The FTC has written about it in the FTC CAN SPAM Compliance Guide for business

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New unsubscribe methods in the news

The folks at The Daily Show, who brought us the wonderful term “High Volume Email Deployer” so very long ago, are once again leading the way in new unsubscribe technology. Unsubscribe by television.

Meanwhile, the folks at The Daily Mash have a different unsubscribe suggestion.

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