Make opting-out a positive learning process

By hiding opt-out messages and links in small print at the end of emails or making the entire process too lengthy for the average email customer to want to bother with, email marketers seemingly want to hush-up the option, found Lyris' recent survey.

But, there are reasons why email recipients choose to unsubscribe and that is valuable information to any marketer, said Stefan Pollard, Lyris' director of e-mail marketing best practices.

The survey of over 400 email marketers found that while 96 percent included an unsubscribe option in their emails, as per federal law, around two-thirds admitted to employing ways of discouraging recipients from using it.

Very few exit processes, just 5 percent, actually asked a customer the reason why they were leaving with most, 18 percent, simply displaying a “goodbye” message.

“Just because they opted out doesn’t mean you have to stop talking to them,” said Pollard. “It’s almost like hanging up the phone on them. They say: ‘No thanks; I’m not interested,’ and you say: ‘Fine. Click.’ That’s not going to tell you why they opted out.”

Ways in which to engage a departing consumer could be to direct them to a preference center from which they can control the frequency of emails along with their content and format. It may not be that they don’t want to hear from you, it may be that they don’t like the way in which it's being done.

“Marketers are not reminding customers that there are other ways to interact with the brand during the unsubscribe process,” said Pollard (via DM News). “I would suggest letting them know about RSS feeds, catalog sign up, doing an unsubscribe survey or providing feedback loops to get the most out of this communication.”

The survey, titled "Unsubscribing in 2007: Marketers Can Get More Out of Goodbye", can be downloaded in full here.

Tags: email marketing, opt-out, unsubscribe