420 Design Blog
Are you annoying your subscribers?
18 Mar 2008 | Angie H
There sure are a lot of email lists one can subscribe to out there. I subscribe to quite a few - some because I want the information; others simply because I want to see what other organizations in various industries are doing in the way of HTML email design. But the one thing I've noticed is that a lot of them sure know how to annoy.
It's not the content or design that's annoying. It's not even the frequency of some of these emails (some I get once or twice a week). What really is annoying is that once I'm done and tired of getting the email there's either no way to unsubscribe or it's a multi-step process to unsubscribe.
Just the other day I wanted to unsubscribe from one particular email and not only was it a multi-step process, it was frustrating, annoying and a flat out pain in the ass. The process went a little something like this:
I looked for their "instantly unsubscribe" link that most emails have. All I could find was a "visit this site to unsubscribe" link. Okay, close enough.
Went to the site and it asked me for a username and password. I figured they meant the username (i.e., email address) and password associated with my subscription. Nope.
- So I tried again. Turns out, I had to set up a NEW ACCOUNT WITH A DIFFERENT WEBSITE in order to submit a support ticket to THEN ask to be removed from the list.
In total, I had to go through at least 5 steps just to get to the right place to then ask to be removed from the email list, not to mention 2 additional emails (one to confirm receipt of the support ticket and one to inform me that I had been removed from the list as requested). It took me 5-10 minutes. Time I'll never get back. But more importantly, that process left a negative impression in my mind about the owner of that email list. Even if I decide later on that their information was valuable enough to subscribe again there's a 99% chance I won't simply due to that experience.
The sad thing about that story though (other than it being true) is that there was an email I wanted to unsubscribe from and there was absolutely no way to do that. That, my friends, is much worse than the above.
Not having any sort of way to unsubscribe from an email list not only cries out desperation by way of trying to keep you locked into it, it will cause more harm than good. The point of having an unsubscribe option at all is two-fold:
- To keep your subscriber list clean,
- And to keep people from simply marking your emails as spam in an effort to get rid of you.
It's that second one that will give you - the email list owner - the most problems. The more people start marking your email as spam or junk mail in their email programs (or flagging it as junk on their server), the less trusted your domain and related email addresses will be by major ISPs. That means that even if you are sending legit emails they may be getting blocked for spam before they even reach the recipient. With time that could mean having the entire server you're hosted on blacklisted. And if you're on shared hosting - as most sites are - that could mean taking down other unrelatd sites with you and your web host suspending or canceling your account for abuse.
"But what about making it too easy to unsubscribe?", I hear you asking. I just don't think that's an issue. It might sound contradictory, but best practices for email lists include making it as easy as possible to get off your list indefinitely. If you're worried that you'll start to lose too many subscribers you should really consider whether or not your content is strong enough to keep them interested. Like a website, email newsletters need to have content to keep readers engaged. Otherwise, quite simply, they'll leave.
So if you've got an email list, make sure you've got an easy, 1-click method of unsubscribing. In the long run you'll be better off.