I received a newsletter earlier today. However, I have no idea who the sender was or why he decided to send it to me. I have no recollection of ever subscribing to it, so I decided to un-subscribe.
That’s when I noticed that there was no un-subscribe option!
Newsletter marketing
Yes, it’s possible someone subscribed to this newsletter using my email address and that the newsletter’s sender doesn’t send confirmation emails.
However, to send anyone a newsletter or any piece of email marketing, with no option to un-subscribe, is a mistake. People hate to feel trapped and to use this kind of approach with one’s marketing is a massive mistake and totally counter productive.
I can’t see anyone recommending a newsletter – even a great one – if they know you can’t get off the subscriber’s list, once you are on it. Equally, I can’t see anyone wanting to do business with a company, which attempts to trap people with its marketing.
If you want to develop a successful newsletter, make the content worth sharing and make it super-easy for people to share it, subscribe to it and un-subscribe from it.
People love to share great content with their friends and they will remain loyal readers and advocates of your newsletter, for as long as they believe it offers them outstanding value.
I think giving people the ability to cancel a service is a must. Nobody likes receiving notifications that when they don’t participate in the service.
Hi Jim,
Sounds a little odd. It’s like going on a store where the front door opens only from outside.
Maybe it’s not a real newsletter; maybe it’s a list of e-mails and the sender uses an automated program to send e-mails by hand.
I’ve earned a bit of reputation as a hard-@ss in my office for ensuring that not only is there an unsub option, but also a physical address and customer service phone number on every email we send on behalf of our clients. The clients think I’m nuts – until I point them to the legal requirements and explain that by going above and beyond what’s actually required, they’re engendering more trust and confidence.
For that matter, what mass email program didn’t do an automatic check? The 3rd party vendors my company uses require that an unsub be provided or they’ll blacklist not only our clients, but us as well.
The mind boggles.
And subscriber churn is really important too.
It’s not the size of your list that counts it’s the quality of you list that’s most important.
As your branding comes to the fore some will be with you and some will be against you. I call this the Ramsay Factor – you love him or hate him and he doesn’t want anyone in-between.
That’s an important concept in branding and marketing.
Be loved or hated but not tolerated. See, that’s a controversial statement too – see, I practice what I preach.
So, are you in or are you out?!
Sean McPheat
The worst is when you unsubscribe only to find your email was then placed on dozens of other email lists. Luckily that was more of a late 90s early 00s thing, don’t see it as much these days.
Unfortunately my hotmail account that I have managed to keep hold of for about ten years now is subscribed to tons of newsletters, all with no un-subscribe option…
Still to this day, I have never managed to get round this problem other than auto forwarding emails or applying various filters with the email client.
It’s awful marketing behaviour, especially seeing the majority of the ones that use this policy are pharmaceutical, drugs, porn, spam related. Hmph!
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I think they call that spam. I get ads for male enhancement all the time. Thankfully SpamBayes takes care of it. If a legitimate marketer is not offering an unsubscribe option, they have no clue. I also have marketers that force you to type your information in. Click on the unsubscribe link, then maybe one more to confirm. That is all that should be necessary.
Newsletters are great but so many people do it the wrong way. I get so many delivered multiple times a week! I unsubscribe to those quickly.
Make it unique content and make me want it!
Content worth sharing, so it should be interesting and original content. We, the ones that like some topic, subscribe to many newsletters. If not interesting every time, we will unsubscribe
I receive emails from 2 places where I have constantly asked for Unsubscribe and it does not happen. It is so annoying. These are very large organisations. You would think businesses of this size, one an international one, would be reasonably responsible.
I’m pretty sure having no unsubscribe and no physical address contravenes the good old CAN-SPAM act and UK legislation too.
Ian
Anything without an unsubscribe link is frankly a shocking oversight – I get the feeling newsletters will die a death – we still produce one, but to be honesy I do query its worth to the business
Simon,
Thanks for the feedback. I have a well established newsletter, even so, it is responsible for the massive majority of my non-recommended work.