one click unsub

Adam Silver silver is a “contract interaction designer with a strong technical background” and a savvy blogger, who just figured out something that I’ve known for a while: One-click unsub is a bad idea. I don’t fault him for being new to the party — you don’t know, until you know. And he frames the problem in a new context: links are for navigation, buttons are for actions. It’s a good way to look at it. Link to a form page, require a button push to unsubscribe, and thus, evade security link scanning that causes false positive unsubs.It seems so simple to me.

Adam Spriggs recently posted a very helpful Salesforce Marketing Cloud tip to his blog, which you’ll find here. In it, he guides you through how to use AMPscript to implement a “two click unsubscribe” process. Why would you want to do that? To keep bots and email security filters from accidentally unsubscribing subscribers without their knowledge, of course. It happens, and it’s a very good thing to protect against. I have long advocated that every “one click unsub” process should actually be a “two click unsub” process, to minimize false positive unsubscribes.

CloudKettle’s Eliot Harper is back! Last time, I linked to him talking about Global Unsubscribe handling in SFMC. This time, his topic is Marketing Cloud’s one-click unsubscribe functionality. If you know me, you know I tell people that one click unsub functionality can be inherently susceptible to bot clicks causing false unsubscribes — and Eliot suggests a configuration modification to help mitigate that problem! It’s not the way that I would have done it, but that’s definitely fine by me. He’s aware of the problem, he’s explaining the problem clearly, and he’s offering up a unique solution, and I’ll trust his logic here. Good thinking, good sir!Find the video here and don’t forget to check out his whole series!

I’ve talked about unsubscribe practices in more detail before, but I think it’s important enough to call this one out on its own.If your email send platform, CRM, or newsletter tool, includes a “one click unsub” link, you’re going to end up with false positive unsubscribes, and at some point, it’s going to drive you bonkers. I’ve had to deal with stuff like a client’s angry CEO wondering why they’re not getting copies of their own newsletter, only to find that their Barracuda or Microsoft email security service is causing the unsubscribe action, by clicking (following) the unsub link, when checking all the links in every email received, to look for bad stuff. Or if you’re trying to do seedlist-based inbox placement testing and your testing vendor/partner has link checking functionality — when this happens you can end up with false positive indications of spam blocking because of accidentally unsubscribed…