In an ideal world, the former owner of the box would have changed all the subscription to a new email address. However, this exercise gave me an in-depth look into hundreds of subscription processes. It wasn’t pretty. Here are some general observations on the good, bad and ugly – not necessarily in that order.

• In more than 90% of cases, the landing pages were so non-descript that the organizational affiliation was unclear. 
• In particular, Lyris applications displayed a page that says “You email address will be removed” and then asks, “Are you sure?” But the page, question, font and Yes button were so bland; I missed them the first couple times and had to repeat the process. 
• Kintera-driven unsub pages were also non-descript, non-personalized forms that required me to enter the email address. Lance Armstrong Foundation was one of the few organizations that had personalized the page with a header. Others had no identifying copy at all.
• Several groups, like the DMA and Philanthropy Today require an account log-in before allowing me to unsubscribe. 
• Organizations using Convio seem to have some options. Some landed me on a page with the organizations header that simply said, “You have been unsubscribed. Thank you.” Some provided a more in-depth customized form that allows the subscriber to differentiate between the topic and all organizational emails. And those folks still on the Get Active platform have a nice interface that allows you to change your profile info and see a history of all emails received – all based on the link data from the email. 
• One of Howard Dean’s emails had a sentence that read, “Click here to unsubscribe from this mailing list.” But, it wasn’t linked. 
• FeedBlitz was the only unsub page that readily gave me an option to change my email address without unsubscribing and resubscribing

The saddest finding was the lack of effort put in by more organizations to customize these crucial relational pages. Unfortunately, most signup processes are just as generic. We would recommend that organizations spend the time and energy to customize the process. If constituents want to leave the list, make sure it isn’t hard, but also provide a compelling reason for them to stay. At the very least, identify yourself.

Note: If people can’t unsubscribe quickly and easily, they may just decide to report your email as SPAM, and that will cause you many problems in email delivery.

April 2008