March 4th, 2012



Rant on Email Notifications

One of the worst-kept secrets in startup land is that emails are among the best drivers of user engagement and re-engagement. When you have those “what is the secret to X company’s success?” conversations, the answer for Facebook, Groupon, and countless others almost always includes mention of email-related notification features.

Perhaps it is because I am a curious early-adopter who will sign up for anything that sounds remotely interesting, but I recently decided that these auto-opt-in notifications were providing negligible value.

Cue the unsubscribe binge. I wanted to be social on my own terms.

So I would like to humbly present a few suggestions for making these sorts of notifications more awesome for the people who want off your lists. Thinking “oh they’re leaving so not worth our time” is NOT THE RIGHT ATTITUDE here. Here’s a one-sentence user anecdote: I unsubscribed from Groupon, 4 months later re-subscribed, bought some stuff, unsubscribed again. I am still a customer. Their unsubscribe page is funny and was called the “Best Unsubscribe Ever” by Wired. They at least pretend to care about you, even on the way out.

Think of it this way: giving the immediate FFFFFUUUUUUUU- just because someone wants to kind of protect his/her inbox is severing ties with a potential future customer or user. Unsubscribers ARE NOT people who hate your service and will never come back again. I get it that startups need to keep their numbers up, but this can be done without pissing off your users in the process.

Let me also say that I have utilized email notifications before and they can be extremely effective if implemented correctly. I am not anti-email; quite the opposite. I love email, think it is fantastic, and plan to utilize email notifications in many future endeavors.

But I know that we can do better.

Here are my four recommendations:

1. One Click Unsubscribe – Do not put email settings behind a sign-in screen.

There are services that I signed up for 10 months ago, don’t use, and don’t remember the password. Are you really going to make me go to “forgot password”, click through from an email, go back to the notifications page, and THEN unsubscribe?

Instead, a much better idea would be to make the unsubscribe link unique, and tied to that user’s specific email address. This way, if you click through directly from your email, you are taken to the notifications page. While maybe not as “secure”, the experience is significantly better for the user.

2. Have a “unsubscribe from all” check box.

There is one New York startup that is a notorious offender here. They make you click probably 4 times to unsubscribe from *each* type of notification they send. I have seen much twitter rage about said startup, and hope someday they fix the issue.

If you have 1 or 20 types of email notifications, no matter how customizable, please pretty please have a large button/check-box at the top that says “unsubscribe from all”. The best implementations do it this way: once this box is checked, then magically all the boxes below become unchecked all at once. It is grand.

3. Make your unsubscribe page mobile-friendly.

People read their email on their phones.

This should not be news.

Please make your page mobile-friendly. This means: readable text, big buttons, big form fields, no pinching.

Not sure how? Read up on the awesomeness of mobile-friendly design here, here and here.

4. Do not send an unsubscribe confirmation email.

These are totally unnecessary. Just don’t send me any more emails. Make sure to say something like “Thanks you are unsubscribed” or “unsubscribe confirmed” on the settings page, and I will trust that you’ve taken care of it.

That’s all. I present these suggestions with love and please know that they are from someone who geniunely enjoys experimenting with new products.

Writing this post has made me realize that us product-types spend an incredible amount of time on the first-user-hand-holding, and maybe not enough time on the soft-landing-exit. Something to think about.

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  • gruber76

    I'm totally on board with you, but for one problem when these are taken as a whole: if an email is good, I want to be able to forward it to a friend without someone five forwards later accidentally unsubscribing me and me not receiving any notification… Catch 22, perhaps.

  • Nicholas Dunn

    Absolutely agree with you.  Sometimes I get so fed up with those e-mail notifications that are locked behind login pages that I just mark the e-mail as spam.  Not worth the time to set up an explicit rule to filter them out.

  • Roger

    Don't forget the “we'll remove you from our lists in 14 business days” message some places give.  It isn't rocket science to do it immediately.

  • http://paulstamatiou.com Paul Stamatiou

    Definitely agreed on #4!

  • http://markbao.com/ Mark Bao

    Thank you for writing this. This is exactly how I feel.

    Services with 1) are just terrible. Having to log in to a service, probably having to do forgot password, hunting for the notification page, unchecking the little checkboxes without an “Uncheck All” button…

    Or having to enter my email again to unsubscribe from something. Dude, just unsubscribe me and give me an undo button if it was an accident.

    Nobody accidentally clicks your eggshell-white, 8-point, non-underlined “unsubscribe” link accidentally, anyway.

  • http://lorenzocaum.com/ Lorenzo Caum

    I feel the same way! Especially the first one — very annoying.

  • iaindooley

    For services that don't allow you to have your emails delivered as a “digest” I created http://emaildigest.me/ that allows you to create a digest by setting up gmail filters.

  • http://amandapeyton.com amanda peyton

    Interesting point. I guess I don't really forward stuff very often that it seemed like a non-issue.

    Here is an idea.  What if you had a large box at the top with the email address that was going to be unsubscribed? Then if you forward it to someone and they unsubscribe you they are just being malicious.

  • http://amandapeyton.com amanda peyton

    Glad you liked the post! Thanks for reading. Agree about the tiny fonts. 

  • Ken

     If you're not going to require any kind of security measures for an unsubscribe, the least you can do is send a confirmation message (#4).  Otherwise a victim can't detect the problem.

  • FAKE GRIMLOCK

    NOTHING CHANGE IN EMAIL OVER LAST 20 YEARS EXCEPT PUT ON WEB.

    THAT LIKE 200,000 INTERNET YEARS.

    ME SAY NO FIX WHAT GET IN EMAIL.

    FIX EMAIL.

    THAT REAL CHANGE.

  • Greg

    Easy enough, make the user type in the first part of their email address or something like that, to prevent mistakes. Malicious unsubscription (really?) you'll probably never be able to stop.

  • http://www.ChrisNorstrom.com Chris Norström

    Most definately. We really do need to rethink email and stop treating it as the online version of real mail. At this point we really need something better than a “mark as spam” button. I'm willing to try anything, a block / request / permissions feature that I can put in place to control who can send me emails would be the first step. And a standardized subscribe + one-click-unsubscribe protocol that's integrated into all email2.0.

  • Robin Fisher

    Completely agree with you. I don't care if you're using an external agency to do your mailings – fix your process.

  • http://engag.io/ William Mougayar

    That field is open for disruption and innovation. Definitely.

  • http://engag.io/ William Mougayar

    Right on the money with these suggestions. But how about collecting feedback on “Why the person unsubscribed”. There are 2 methods that come to mind:
    - offer a quick feedback link or simple email link in the confirmation screen pop-up
    - send 1 email from the CEO…sorry to see you leave, if you care to tell me why…

    Other thoughts on that? 

  • iaindooley

    Changing email as a transport mechanism isn't required – we just need to change the applications we use to view email.

    The most depressing thing is that very few people ever really learned to use email properly and all the “innovations” in email so far (ie. sticking rich text and images in it) have largely ruined it as a communications medium.

    When people talk about wanting to “change email” my first reaction is usually “how about we, as a group, really learn to use email properly first, then make a decision”.

    Of course, this won't happen – someone will come along with some platform specific app that makes it really great to do email on one device that's the most dominant and every will fall in love with it, resulting in the rest of the computing world have to conform with whatever idiotic new features it has, but a man can dream.

  • FAKE GRIMLOCK

    MAYBE BUILD NEW WAY CONSUME EMAIL NOT AS HARD AS YOU THINK.

  • name goes here

    This looks nice. I already mask my real address using mailinator-dot-com (public, temporary storage, both web & RSS accessible inboxes) or spamgourmet-dot-com (custom forwarding addresses, auto-created, self-destructing with overrides available to make them persistent). Digesting these emails (whether for delivery at a time of day or week, or upon a count being reached) seems like the next step.