In Focus

How to piss off your customers

G. Simms Jenkins
Email Posted on August 13, 2007

Broken links, unsubscribe failures

Nothing says spammer like broken links and information black holes. This includes responding to an email and immediately receiving an auto response that says this email box is not viewed or a bounce back that the email address is not valid. Ditto for links to the site that are broken or have confusing and seemingly irrelevant information.

I recently attempted to unsubscribe from one major retailer’s emails in vain for more than six weeks, and I am still receiving their promotional emails. The links worked and it even told me I was unsubscribed after completing the laborious process on their site. However, obviously the process didn’t work completely as the emails keep coming to my inbox. Now that is a way to piss off a customer. Talk about the power of email. I now consider their emails to me as spam, which they are legally because they did not remove me within 10 business days.

If I had to guess, this wasn’t a malicious effort to keep me on their list, but rather the fact that, like many big (and small) companies, no one internally has probably tested the process in months. They better hope the FTC doesn’t get seeded on their lists. Internal audits are key, folks.

Additionally, be sure your unsubscribe links are in text and not just a button, given the increasing prevalence of image suppression. The customer and the law don’t necessarily care about the spirit of CAN-SPAM compliance if the letter of the law is trampled on.

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Comments

Paul Garcia
Paul Garcia August 13, 2007 at 11:00 AM

What I would like to see from the industry, particularly the email providers, is an effort to distinguish (as you mention) the difference between true junk mail, and messages you no longer wish to receive. What is needed is an "remove me" button in addition to the "Spam" button. This would reply to the sender with the "please add me to your do not e-mail list" request, or even better, it would open a form that would ask you to explain why you want to be removed, then include that information into a remove request. It's currently too convinient for users to mislabel messages as violations (spam), which causes no end of headaches for legitimate senders. They may label a purchase receipt as Junk, and then that tallies one more bad mark against your rating as a Goodmail sender or other certified mail sender. No reason to legitimately accept that rating, when it's a purchase receipt, but no distinction in the industry between Junk and unfamiliar messages. This would be tremendously valuable for companies who send mail, would educate the consumer to the difference between true junk and stuff you just don't want anymore, and it would lift some of the burden of proof that legitimate senders have now that they're complying with good email practices. It is still on the companies to handle remove requests promptly and professionally, but I, for one, am tired of getting Spam complaints from customers for purchase receipts mailed to them.