Alternately, noting them but not sending them an email at all.
Much like a gym membership, the people who don't use it at all but feel like they should someday (as long as they're not nagged about not using it) are one of the most profitable subscriber segments. Sure, they'll leave eventually, but they're not using your service anyway, and until then it's free money.
I've looked at doing this a couple of times by segmenting subscribers that never open or click a campaign. Instead of silently unsubscribing them I send them an email with a GIANT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON and explain why they fell into that segment.
The two times I've tried this I've had a number of responses asking why they made their way onto the list as they enjoy the email but block any tracking. Just a word of warning.
I'm glad you agree that it is indeed considered a best practice to automatically unsubscribe someone who legitimately subscribed, when they don't read your emails.
Some emails have unsubscribe links and I use them. Occasionally, I respond and ask them to take me off their list. Also, I don't let it bother me because it sucks worse when no emails come in.
I will agree with you if you have to type your email in first.
The ideal situation, I think, is to have the user type in their email. If it's an existing subscriber, unsubscribe. If it's not, add them to a secondary list just to keep track of who definitely does not want the emails.
I just press unsubscribe and I have never seen anyone doing something nefarious. I rarely get subscription emails from things I haven't signed up to to begin with.
If someone wants to unsubscribe, that's probably because they don't want to be your customer any more anyway. Unsubscribing for a now-irrelevant-to-them e-mail list may be a problem for these ex-customers, but it isn't yours any more.
Warn them and give them a link to unsubscribe easily, but don't miss out on the opportunity to collect a single data point on why they are unsubscribing (checkboxes or buttons for 'Didnt use it', 'Didnt find it useful', 'Too expensive', 'Buggy', etc...)
I've never done that, no. That's not very nice, but it's also bad business. People who unsubscribe have already told you they aren't interested. Email them again and you're far more likely to provoke an angry response than a useful click/open.
Also, remove inactive users from your list periodically. (Send them a message warning them they will be unsubscribed though, with an option to stay subscribed.)
Incredibly insightful, thank you for taking the time to post this!
> - Don't send to addresses where you have not contacted them or had any interaction at all for > 1 year. If you haven't kept in touch with your customers, then that is on you.
That seems odd though. "Keeping in touch" in regular intervals is exactly the kind of thing customers may want to unsubscribe from, so a working unsubscribe function means there are customers where I cannot keep in touch. How is that on me? That means I can't send e.g. a password reset email to them if they try to log in two years later?
I work for an online subscription service, and we don't expose a way for users to delete their accounts in the UI, nor end their paid subscription.
The amount of requests for these are low enough to be manageable. In return, we get the opportunity to maybe convince them to stay, or at least get some valuable feedback of why they choose to leave.
Of course, users are always unsubscribed when they ask, no funny business here. The company is European.
> And if all this still goes wrong... if the person liked your newsletter enough, they'll figure out what happened when they stop getting it.
Not necessarily, unfortunately. As an example, take emails advertising pre-sale tickets to events, sent to people who have signed up specifically to have access to buy tickets before the general public.
If their friend is able to unsubscribe them, they don't get the email and miss the pre-sale access. Even if they do realise and resubscribe, there's a good chance they'll have missed the pre-sale period anyway (which only lasts a few days).
That's one of many examples that make "not to worry they'll just resubscribe" not quite work properly.
> The best way to mitigate this is a simple "You unsubscribed whatever@gmail.com", with a little undo button in case it was a mistake.
In addition to this, it's worth putting "This email was sent to whatever@gmail.com, unsubscribe by clicking here" in the email.
I always wonder to what extent those opt outs actually do something. I remember reading about the “unsubscribe” button for emails that never really did anything.
Much like a gym membership, the people who don't use it at all but feel like they should someday (as long as they're not nagged about not using it) are one of the most profitable subscriber segments. Sure, they'll leave eventually, but they're not using your service anyway, and until then it's free money.
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