Unsubscribe Means UNSUBSCRIBE

Originally posted (May 2011)

Or does it?
Okay, I’ve about had it with unsubscribes. I have 22 email addresses between those for my own businesses and those of my clients that I monitor for them. So you can imagine just how many emails I get in a day. Well &mdash maybe you can’t. It’s in the range of 1500-1800 emails per day! So if you think you receive a lot of junk mail in your inbox just think about how many I get – especially since a couple of my addresses are about 15 years old. I’m on every list you can imagine!

So when I say UNSUBSCRIBE, I mean UNSUBSCRIBE! I don’t mean, maybe. I mean I do not want to receive these emails. Don’t get me wrong – I subscribe to a wide variety of information for my magazine and businesses, but there are many I don’t subscribe but receive because somehow I have landed on their email lists, regardless of how many times I unsubscribe to them. If you do any kind of email marketing, you know that one of email marketing’s “best practices” is permission-based email. Meaning, the recipient has given you permission in one way or another to be added to your email database. One of the other “best practices” is to allow recipients to unsubscribe at any time and update their profile with you. Well, that’s easier said than done. These days I have been on a mission to unsubscribe to all the unwanted emails that come through my inbox. Guess what 90% of the unsubscribe links DO NOT WORK! The URL is either non-existent, or you receive a message that states “you have successfully unsubscribed”, only for you to check your email the next day and find you are still on the list! Great – what was the point of unsubscribing? As an email marketer, I try to adhere to email marketing’s ‘best practices’. Since I use Constant Contact for my email marketing, when you click the unsubscribe button on one of my email campaigns – you are removed from my database instantly! Not only are you removed from my database – there is nothing in this world that I can do to add you back in to the system. Your email address is entered into my system as ‘DO NOT MAIL’. Once deemed ‘DO NOT MAIL’, I cannot send you another thing, unless you add yourself back in. So, if Constant Contact can figure out how to have an UNSUBSCRIBE link that works, why can’t the other email marketing providers out there do the same. Believe me, I get email campaigns from all of them. While I won’t get into naming names as I can’t honestly remember which email marketing services’ UNSUBSCRIBE links don’t work, I can tell you &mdash if you receive an email from a business using Constant Contact and you UNSUBSCRIBE, you have been UNSUBSCRIBED!  

On that note – if a person that has received one of my email campaigns and replies to that campaign asking to be removed from my list instead of using the UNSUBSCRIBE button, I manually go into my Constant Contact system and add them to the DO NOT MAIL list. It’s the least I can do, since I don’t want unwanted email either! 

If only all email marketers were so conscientious!