* Best practice ways of enabling your subscribers to unsubscribe
Last week in my Backspin column (see link below), I mentioned a problem I had with unsubscribing from a mail list that domain name registrar Dotster had included me on. The problem was that the address I had subscribed with was an alias for another account. When I decided that I wasn’t interested in the newsletter I did as Dotster suggested and replied with “Unsubscribe” in the subject.
Of course, the “from:” address header of my message was for the real account and thus the unsubscribe didn’t work. I didn’t realize this at the time, so when subsequent messages arrived I, not unreasonably, assumed that Dotster was simply committed to spamming me. I had cited Dotster in an earlier Backspin for not letting me live in peace and in short order I got a testy note from its communications manager which led to me eventually discovering what was going on.
As I complained in Backspin (and I get to quote myself for a change): “Of course, I am the only person in the world who uses aliases. And as I am also the only person in the world to make this mistake, adding code to reply to unsuccessful unsubscribes with ‘Sorry but we have no record of that address being subscribed,’ would be a waste of their time. Even so, mea culpa.”
I have since had several messages from readers who not only sympathized with my take on this but went further to say that they considered that any business that doesn’t make unsubscribing logical and simple is lacking a clue about customer relationship management and damaging their brand in the process.
Having thought about this problem for a while, here’s my checklist for how you should handle unsubscribes:
1. Make sure that if you get an unsubscribe request from an address that isn’t on your list you reply to that address telling them that they aren’t subscribed.
2. Either:
a. Embed the subscriber’s address in the message body so that e-mail unsubscribes created by replying can be cross-checked against the apparent from: header.
b. Give the user an unsubscribe link to a Web site that contains the subscription ID so that they don’t have to enter their e-mail address when they get there.
Note that the URL you provide should not be so long that it can get broken up in a message – ideally put the short URL on a line by itself.
3. Do not try to make the user fill in an “exit” poll when they unsubscribe because even if they do, after a couple of months you won’t be reading the responses anyway. If you really believe that you will be paying attention, ask no more than three questions. Do not make any of them mandatory. Do not be surprised if you see liberal swearing in the exit surveys if your unsubscribe requests and list management is not up to par.
If you want to have a good brand image and reputation and not have lots of people annoyed with you, make sure that you follow the above rules. They aren’t hard to implement and if you get it right you won’t find your company oversights discussed in Backspin and the Network World Web Applications newsletter.
