“I turn on my computer. I wait impatiently as it connects. I go online, and my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words: You’ve got mail. I hear nothing. Not even a sound on the streets of New York, just the beating of my own heart. I have mail. From you.”
– Kathleen Kelly in You’ve got Mail (1998)
In 1998, email was romantic. In 2015, it’s a nightmare.
Promotional emails, updates and news from the hundreds of services we sign up for, lurk and grow in our inboxes like cancerous cells. They’re there. We nuke them on a daily basis. But miss one day, and the emails pile up. Trying to keep those mails away from my inbox seems to be a losing battle. One way to prevent the virtual clutter is unsubscribing to emails.
Overshadowed by glossy sophisticated graphics, the poor unsubscribe link is perhaps given the least respect in email marketing – an afterthought, almost never incorporated in layouts and invariably in some corner as an un-styled plain text. The actual process of unsubscribing doesn’t make for a pretty experience either. So this post is dedicated to the all important unsubscribe link, in as many different shapes and behaviours as I encountered in the wild.
The single click
The single click unsubscribe is perhaps the easiest way for a user to exit. A link to undo the un-subscription is usually provided with the confirmation message. For most cases this is sufficient, but also a lost opportunity. A few marketers try to get creative with the copy of the message to nudge users to re-subscribe. By adding humour (example: charity:water) or a tinge of guilt (examples: Groupon and HubSpot), at the very least, these services make sure that they stand out among the email class.
The big data junkie
Lately, it appears that services are using emails to create user accounts – without the consent of subscribers. So when I hit unsubscribe on some of the emails I signed up for, I was asked to log in to my account (which I never created) and set my preferences! Here are a couple of real-life scenarios I faced while unsubscribing:
It may seem exaggerated (it isn’t) – especially if you imagine having to perform all these actions on an unresponsive website on a phone. Sure, I remember which services I unsubscribed from, but only because I will know never to return.
The ultimate user experience
This email from Maria Popova says it all:
In one single mail, Maria has not only ensured that some load is shed from her email server, but also remained at the top of my mind for eternity. The ultimate unsubscribe which has unburdened my inbox, without making me feel guilty and at the same time made me want to praise her to the roof and beyond.
What about you? Does your service fall under any of these categories? Do you have any unsubscribe scenarios of your own? Let us know in comments.