Results and analysis of 2007 unsubscribe survey among email marketers.

Here's what our survey of unsubscribe policies and practices among email marketers turned up in 2007:

The good news is that almost all are complying with best practices about giving customers the opportunity to unsubscribe from their mailings, making it easy to find and use the unsubscribe link and honoring that unsubscribe relatively expeditiously.

However, marketers can do so much more to learn about their customers from the unsubscribe process and to offer alternatives that would retain them as customers somewhere within their databases.

Why scrutinize unsubscribe practices? Because providing a method for subscribers to leave your mailing list is a crucial component of email marketing, contrary to almost any other form of marketing and advertising.

• Consumers who don't trust your unsubscribe process are more likely to report you to their ISPs as a spammer.
• The unsubscribe process itself is a rich vein of information about how your subscribers are thinking, how they see your company and what they want from you.
• Having a workable, trustworthy unsubscribe process can even retain a customer for you if you give them other options.

So, when done correctly, unsubscribing can actually benefit your email program.

In this article, I will list four of the major findings, analyze what they mean to you as an email sender and recommend how you can improve your own unsubscribe program and boost your email marketing program performance overall.

If you'd like to see the full report, follow this link to register for a PDF copy of all findings, charts and recommendations. See the end of this article for details on when and how this survey was conducted.

The Unsubscribe Picture 2007: Compliance and Opportunity

Finding 1: 96% of marketers include an unsubscribe link in their promotional emails but fail to include it in other critical contact points including welcome emails, transactional and customer support messages or autoresponders.

Question: Which of your email messages on this list includes a method for subscribers to request removal?

Analysis: Marketers are, for the most part, including unsubscribe instructions in all promotional emails. However, they're missing the opportunity to build customer trust and allow them to control their inboxes by adding the unsubscribe to other critical customer contact points. 

Key to this is the welcome message, normally sent out as soon as the subscriber confirms the request. Why would you give your newest subscribers the option to jump off the wagon right away? Because people do sometimes subscribe by mistake. (You can alleviate this by not using prechecked boxes on your registration form, by the way.)

When you don't provide an unsubscribe method in that welcome email, you force recipients to receive more email from you. That increases the risk that they'll click the spam button, since they don't want to hear from you, and they may not trust you to honor the unsubscribe request.

(Are you among the 9% to 10% who don't know if your nonpromotional emails do or don't carry this information? Better find out fast!)

Recommendation: Provide unsubscribe information in every email sent to subscribers or customers.

Finding 2: More than three-quarters of marketers use an easy unsubscribe method, such as a one-click unsubscribe link or reply to the email message, and another 25% let subscribers access a profile-update page without having to log in first.

Question: For marketing email messages, which of the following methods do you use for enabling subscribers to request removal from future mailings? (Check all that apply)

An unsubscribe isn't always about saying goodbye. Maybe the subscriber's needs or interests change, or he wants to update an address, or hear from you more or less often. This is where profile pages can help you reduce unsubscribes and give users a more valuable experience.

Marketers, however, aren't using this option as much as they might. The survey found only 25% give subscribers this option. Another 16.8% do direct traffic to the profile page but require a password or other log-in method. This defeats the purpose in some cases because people often forget passwords. So, they'll either have to request a reminder or generate a new one. That adds at least another step to the process and boosts the chance they'll just give up and spam-button your email out of frustration.

Recommendation: Use a two-step process. Click One takes the user to a profile page that loads with their data populated in all the fields. Click Two confirms the removal request or changes in the profile. Also, provide other opportunities to request removal, including contact information for a Web form or customer-support contacts if the profile page doesn't work.

Finding 3: Over half of marketers acknowledge the unsubscribe on the landing page, while less than a third send an email confirmation. Eleven percent of marketers either don't acknowledge the unsubscribe or provide language they will continue to mail to the address until the 10-day CAN-SPAM window closes.

Question: Which of these actions do you take once the subscriber has asked to be removed?

Analysis: Acknowledging the unsubscribe helps to build trust in your email program because it tells the subscriber immediately that the request was successful. It also gives you an opportunity to maintain a relationship with that subscriber, because you can offer other ways to get information, such as changing frequency, format or content. Even if the subscriber does intend to leave your program, a graceful goodbye, with thanks for their previous patronage, can strengthen that relationship.

Recommendation: Acknowledge the unsubscribe immediately in the same medium that was used to request removal: confirm on the landing page when the request comes via clicking a link, and email the confirmation when the user uses an auto-reply unsubscribe or sends in a personal request.

Finding 4: Fewer than 20% of marketers use the unsubscribe confirmation to remind subscribers about other communication options or seek valuable exit information.

Question: If your email unsubscribe process links to a Web page, does the landing page contain any of the following?

Analysis: Along the same lines as Finding 3, marketers are not using the unsubscribe to offer recipients other options for receiving information or explaining why they unsubscribed.

The unsubscribe doesn't have to be a final farewell, but marketers too often treat it that way, given the nearly half who use the message format merely to confirm the unsubscribe. Less than 20% include any kind of goodbye message, and fewer than 1 in 10 includes any kind of outreach, including a customer-service phone number, an incentive to resubscribe or update a profile, offer an exit survey to learn the reasons for unsubscribing or offer suggestions, or remind the subscriber of other channels, such as RSS feeds or direct mail.

Recommendation: Always acknowledge the unsubscribe with a personal message thanking the subscriber for his patronage, offering other options for receiving message and an opportunity to explain the request and providing contact information including phone numbers and links to your Web site.

Other findings and recommendations:

1. Test your subscribe and unsubscribe process at least once a month to make sure it works.  We found almost half never test their unsubscribe method once they set it up, while less than 1 in 4 test after they get a complaint that it's not working. Because almost 60% of marketers rely on their email software to manage the process, it's easy to forget about checking until it's too late.

2. Honor unsubscribe requests received through other channels.  We found 44% of marketers empower their customer-support centers, such as phone support, to manually remove addresses. However, given that only 16% include a customer-service phone number in their unsubscribe process, this forces your subscriber to hunt down your contact info at your Web site and adds another barrier to successful unsubscribing.

3. Construct an unsubscribe page, or add options to your current profile page, that give multiple unsubscribe options. These can include a global unsubscribe from all of your mailings or the option to leave just one or two. Again, this can allow a subscriber to make a clean break without the risk that subsequent mailings could trigger a spam block, or help retain subscribers who want something different without having to leave the store.

Survey Background and Methodology 

Unsubscribing has evolved from the early days when marketers pulled every stunt in the book to keep subscribers from leaving. Not only did that tactic backfire, it brought on the curse of the "report spam" button. That in turn led marketers to the other extreme, the "no-questions-asked" policy that freed subscribers with one click but broke the connection with subscribers.

The unsubscribe process, then, has to serve multiple needs. It has to be legally sound, trusted by recipients and deliver value to the company. We at Lyris intended this survey to measure how well marketers are meeting all of these challenges by assessing their practices, attitudes and experiences.

More than 400 email professionals responded to our invitation to fill out the survey in fall 2007. Follow this link to download your personal copy of the full report with charts, statistics, analysis and recommended best practices.

If you were one of our survey participants, we thank you for sharing your practices, attitudes and experiences. I will follow up on several of these issues in my regular ClickZ Delivery column and future Intevation Reports.

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