Unsub Optimal
Best practices for respectful email marketing
When I ask CEOs “Do you value your long-term relationship with your customers?” they all emphatically answer YES! “Do you value your customers’ time and respect their choices when you interact with them?” They again nod their heads and say OF COURSE.
So how did it become acceptable to aggressively opt consumers into email marketing and then make it so difficult for them to unsubscribe?
The objective of this post is to shine a light on the current email marketing practiced by the largest consumer websites in the United States, and celebrate the brands that are doing it right.
Of course this is a subjective topic and my definition of “doing it right” is based on two simple principles:
- Provide a clear, visible, easy-to-find unsubscribe link in your email marketing. Do not use a light gray six point font text link buried in a paragraph full of legal boilerplate.
- Make sure that link is a one-click unsubscribe from all email marketing. Do not force the customer to log in, or make additional clicks, or uncheck myriad boxes.
In the summer of 2020, we analyzed the email unsubscribe experience of the top 100 US websites (according to Alexa) and scored them with the following methodology:
The positive points are pretty self-explanatory: 50 points for an easy-to-find link and 25–50 additional points depending on how many clicks it takes to unsubscribe.
The negative points are more nuanced:
- -50 if you hide your link (only one site tested got dinged for this)
- -25 if you require the customer to log in in order to unsubscribe
- -10 if your marketing email is so long that it’s clipped in Gmail, thereby clipping your footer and removing the option to unsubscribe
- -5 if your link only subscribes one ‘channel’, and requires more work by the customer to unsubscribe from everything
- -5 if you send a confirmation email after the customer asked to unsubscribe from email
In simplest terms, if you make your unsubscribe link clearly visible in your emails and give your customer a one-click experience with no added friction, you get a perfect score of 100. Sounds simple enough, right? Well… the results of our test were surprising.
The Good
Out of the 100 sites tested, these fourteen achieved the perfect score of 100:
Let’s use Walmart as an example of an optimal unsubscribe experience:
The Bad
Half of the sites we tested scored between 85 and 40, largely due to requiring multiple clicks or requiring login before allowing the consumer to unsubscribe.
14 of these brands require more than two clicks to unsubscribe, including Apple. 28 sites require that you enter your email and password before you can unsubscribe. If you’ve ever received marketing email because someone else signed up with your email you know how incredibly frustrating this experience can be!
Another popular dark pattern, utilized by 32 of the 100 sites tested, is to sign you up for multiple “channels” of email marketing and then set each email unsubscribe link to only work for one channel. Often you have to log in, navigate to communication preferences, and click one by one to unsubscribe from the other channels.
Shouldn’t the inventor of 1-Click shopping give us 1-Click unsubscribe?
In our test Amazon.com scored in the bottom three, with a score of 15, largely due to an unsubscribe link that is hard for the consumer to find. In fact, the word “unsubscribe” does not appear anywhere in their email:
In addition, Amazon plays the “channel” game and requires you to log in and turn off other email subscriptions. Shouldn’t the inventor of 1-Click shopping give us 1-Click unsubscribe? Instead we get this:
Finally, our worst performer, PayPal, with a score of -10. PayPal was the only site that we dinged -50 points for a hidden unsubscribe link, and because of that PayPal was the only brand to achieve a negative score on this test.
You might disagree with us (and I’m sure PayPal will) but our conclusion was that the decision to place a small unsubscribe link in the middle of a dense set of legal boilerplate could only have been to intentionally obfuscate it:
Here’s a link to a Google Sheet with the full list of web sites tested and their scores. Huge thanks to our 2020 summer intern Josh Love who performed the research work of subscribing, unsubscribing, and scoring over several months.
Making the Jump to Better Email Marketing
I hope this inspires consumer brands to play the long game and audit and improve all their customer touch points, including email unsubscribe.
The carrot is improved customer experience, and the stick is that email clients like Gmail and Outlook are building their own unsubscribe functionality into the toolbar of the client. Here’s what Gmail’s looks like:
In the short term, this may push email marketers to add friction and require login before unsubscribe to thwart Gmail. But if enough consumers press that ‘report spam’ button the company’s email deliverability will ultimately suffer.
For the consumer companies playing the long game, they’ll continue to improve their marketing tactics in order to delight their customers, and move from brand frustration to brand adoration.
If you have email marketing experiences, positive or negative, that you’d like to share: send ’em my way as a DM on Twitter to @jamesjoaquin.
