More Marketers Making It Difficult To Unsubscribe From E-mail: Study

Should it really take three clicks to unsubscribe from a retailer’s e-mail list? A plurality of marketers seems to think so, as 39% require at least this many.

What’s even more distressing, according to Responsys’s Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study, is that this trend seems to be accelerating. The 39% represents jump from 7% in 2008. According to Responsys, “It's a worrisome trend since anything beyond two clicks simply represents poor process design.”

The study also found that 30% of retailers send one or more e-mails following an unsubscribe request, up from 26% in 2008.

"When you're competing against the ruthless efficiency and trustworthiness of the 'report spam' button, your email opt-out process needs to be friction-free and provide options ISPs can't give their users," said Chad White, research director at Responsys and author of the study, in a statement.

Other findings revealed in the study include:
In order to keep subscribers, marketers are giving subscribers more control over email frequency, with 35% of retailers allowing subscribers to reduce the number of emails they receive, up from 16% in 2008.

Marketers remain icy and indifferent toward subscribers who opt-out, as evidenced by the fact that only 16% of retailers say "Goodbye" or "Thank you" to departing subscribers. That's down from 18% in 2008.

Marketers have been slow to present alternative channels like RSS and Facebook pages to departing subscribers. Only 7% of retailers do this currently, despite the fact that more than 30% of them include community links in their emails.

Due to failures to honor opt-outs, 4% of retailers are not in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act, which is similar to 2008 levels.

"Savvy marketers respect their email subscribers and provide relevant content to drive engagement – and they also let subscribers go when they're not engaged," said Ed Henrich, VP of professional services at Responsys, in a statement. "Marketers need to make it easy to unsubscribe and to re-subscribe when the time is right. One of my favorite ratios is the number of buyers divided by the number of unsubscribers: how many people today thought you hit the mark versus totally missed the mark?"