Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

Attention all email marketers: Make your unsubscribe link easily visible and easily found, or feel my wrath.

When I first started doing email marketing a few years ago, I stumbled around with design problems, browser issues, spam blockers and the day-to-day headaches associated with this fluctuating medium. Through some personal stumbles and research I have done, I have seen both the really good uses of usability in email marketing and the really bad.

The Really Bad
The most blatant abuser of the lack of unsubscribe policy is the hardcore spammer. These are the jumbled jargon of words you receive that pertain to nothing. There is no visible way to do anything in the email and in 99% of cases, there is no unsubscribe link or method obvious to anyone. In fact, the point of many of these spam emails is to have you respond saying “UNSUBSCRIBE” in order to validate that a real person was on the end of this spam solicitation.

The Pretty Bad
The kinda bad are the email marketers that have only one option for unsubscribing which is behind a number of logins, account options, hidden somewhere on their website or otherwise not presented to the user with one easy link for them to click. Two such offenders I have recently seen are Performance Bike (who I just bought a bike through) and Barnes and Noble.

Performance Bike:
First of all, Performance Bike, you need to tone down the volume of emails you send. I bought my bike three weeks ago and have already gotten 10 emails. 10! I don’t think I get ten emails from my family members or close friends over the course of 3 weeks. I really wanted to be a brand cheerleader, as your customer service is second to none (at least at the Halsted location), but the flood of emails will make me weary of giving it out again. Second, what’s going on with your unsubscribe page? I click on the link at the very end of the email and I get this:

So I’m presented with a screen that first says “Join our list” which is the opposite of what I want to do. And then I am presented with a Status 500 error and can’t even submit the form, which I have actually seen before and itself is not intuitive how I unsubscribe from that. So overall, it’s pretty bad. So I wrote Performance Bike an email and explicitly told them not to send me any more emails. What happens? Two more emails. So what was my reaction, “Report Spam”. Now, I understand email marketing and what occurs when a person hits “Report Spam”, but the average Joe is not going to give it a second thought if you don’t make the unsubscribe button clear as day for them to find and remove themselves.

Lesson #1: Take people off the list immediately. No more of this “May take up to 24 hours stuff”.

Lesson #2: Regularly test your unsubscribe module to make sure it is always in working order.

The second offender on the list is: Barnes and Noble.

Barnes and Noble:
They have sent me numerous emails talking about book sales and in store promotions and what not, which I kind of appreciated, but the volume you send them (about every two or three days) was getting pretty obnoxious, especially for someone who goes through one book every two months. If I want a book, I will come to the store and pick it up.

So they sent me one email too many and I tried to unsubscribe. Here is what I saw in their email:

Lesson #3: Don’t make users login to anything in order to unsubscribe. Just let them.

I went to the bn.com website and tried to login, but could not remember my password. Tried multiple times and couldn’t get in. So instead of having them send me ANOTHER email to remind me of my password, I just returned to Gmail and hit “Report Spam”. Again, making the user login and update a profile online is 3 steps too many for them to go through in order to be removed from the list.

So who does email marketing right? Wine.com

The Pretty Good - Wine.com
So I bought a few bottles of wine a few years back and since then I have been getting emails from Wine.com about holiday promotions and different discounts they have been offering. None of them really appeals to me, but I usually read the emails as I like to know what’s on the market.

I got one the other day and I was in an unsubscribing spree with the other ones. I looked around in the Wine.com email for unsubscribe instructions and saw something that made me a little gleeful.

Lesson #4: Provide users with a way to respond to emails manually with “UNSUBSCRIBE” and get unsubscribed.

Wine.com allows you to respond to any email with the subject line “UNSUBSCRIBE” and get taken off their list - immediately.

The Really Good - Who is it?

Someone can correct me, but I haven’t really seen a truly 100% right way of doing the “UNSUBSCRIBE” in that you provide people with a method to both click a link or respond with an email message. It’s usually one or the other. I know that Constant Contact and Exact Target both provide links to unsubscribe, but I don’t think you can respond to their emails and get taken off of the list automatically.

So what’s Lesson #5?

Lesson #5: If you make it easy for your users to unsubscribe, they may resubscribe in the future.

I’m thinking about signing up for the Wine.com email newsletter again after writing this. They made the process so easy, that I don’t mind signing up again.

Who out there has had a similar experience? Better or Worse?