unsubscribe
The worst thing about the yahoogle requirements has been their use of the term “one-click unsubscribe”. It’s an overloaded term that’s being used here to mean RFC 8058 in-app unsubscription. That’s a completely different thing to what one-click unsubscription has been used to mean for decades, often in the context of complying with legal requirements around unsubscription. It’s confusing. So here’s the simple explanation. To comply with everyone’s unsubscription requirements you need to do two things. First thing You need to have a clear link visible in the body of your message that allows users to unsubscribe. It’s the link you already have in the footer of your message: When the user clicks on it they should go to a web page. That web page must have a clear, conspicuous button that the user can click to unsubscribe. It cannot require them to provide any other information. That page can
When someone sends a complaint to your compliance desk there are a range of things you want to do, but one thing you always want to do is ensure that the recipient doesn’t receive any more unwanted email from your customer. Or, at least, not from your network. There are usually several different ways you can make sure that happens. There are big hammers a compliance desk can use in egregious cases – if the customer is immediately terminated, or has their ability to send mail suspended then there won’t be any more unwanted email to anyone, including the person who has reported unwanted mail. More normally, though, you’ll want to stop all mail from your customer to just the person reporting them immediately, at least while you look at the customers statistics and investigate further. If the report includes a copy of the offending email then there’ll be an
Eventually our subscribers won’t want our email in their inbox any more. They can stop the mail either by unsubscribing from it, or by marking it as spam. We’d far rather they do the first so we should make it as easy as possible for them to unsubscribe. Also in most jurisdictions you’re legally required to offer a functional, easy to use unsubscription channel. So, how to do that? There are a few different ways to accept unsubscription requests, and most legitimate bulk mail should offer several of them. Reply to unsubscribe The recipient replies to the email, the person handling replies removes them from the list. This is a problematic way of handling unsubscription requests. On the one hand, sending mail that recipients can’t reply to, or where replies are bounced, responded to automatically or silently discarded is fairly recipient-hostile. It’s better if those replies go to a customer
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.
Last week I talked about one-click unsubscribe and why I don’t think it’s a great process. Basically, my concern is bot clicks. I’ve seen it happen too many times — email security software will scan an email message body and follow all the links in the message. This triggers a one click unsub and can result in people falling off of an email list. Does it happen in the millions? Possibly not, but when it happens to the client when trying to send to themselves, and suddenly their CEO or CMO is mad that messages are no longer be received, it results in a client angry at a CRM or ESP platform. It’s pain, and it’s self-inflicted pain, and a smart sending platform should try to prevent this pain.TL;DR? One click should really be two click. Go read my prior “hot take” for more details.Anyway, a couple of ISP/MBP (mailbox…
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…
Eliot Harper from CloudKettle has done an amazing thing: Tasked himself with understanding the different types of global unsubscribe handling in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, and created this fantastic explanation of how these work and what Marketing Cloud users should expect as far as how these will impact who you can or cannot send email messages to via that platform. If you’re an SFMC user or consultant, you’ll know that this is a complex feature that can confuse folks easily. Eliot does a wonderful job of breaking it down and helping to make it easy to grasp. Great job, sir!
Last time, I wrote about list-unsubscribe methodology specifically, but today I’d like to broaden the topic to all the different methods that senders use to offer an opt-out option for their subscribers. That could include “one click” unsubscribe links, or leading users to unsubscribe screens or profile center pages, or asking a subscriber to reply to a message using a special tagged address, or sometimes people will say “just reply to abc@xyz.example with UNSUB in the subject line.”Some are better than others. Here’s some pros and cons around different types of unsubscribe methodology, as filtered through my twenty years of watching people send marketing messages (and seeing both a lot of good senders and bad senders along the way).Unsubscribe via email: Reply-to-unsubscribe with a tagged address.Maybe your sending platform puts a tagged address in the reply-to header and tells you that if you want to unsubscribe, you should send mail…
From The DRIP: More great content from Lucy Mazalon. This time around, she details what Salesforce Pardot does to help users deal with non-human interactions, aka bot and security device clicks and activity. Metrics Guard and Visitor Filters being two key Pardot features that will help you out. And, very importantly, she didn’t forget the two-click unsubscribe — making sure that your unsubscribing user has to click a button or link on the landing page before they are considered unsubscribed. Bots won’t do that; people will. (If your email sending platform doesn’t support two-click unsubscribe, then you need to start asking them why that is. It’s a best practice nowadays.)Read it here.