Obviously not looking for hyperaccurate answers, just in general, how many people tend to unsubscribe from promotional emails and how many tick the option “I never signed up for this”?
For us, probably 1 in 10-15ish say they never signed up. We also have a double opt in, meaning every single one of them opened an email and clicked a link to confirm they wanted to keep getting marketing emails
About 0.2% of people unsubscribe every time we send something out
That’s… an astonishingly low number.
It’s more understandable when you realize that it’s less effort to mark it as spam than it is to go through all the unsubscribe hurdles.
Funny you say this. Every few months I search my emails for “unsubscribe” and click through each of them to… unsubscribe. I’ve always been pretty religious about this somehow believing that even though the impact may not be immediately obvious it would be in the long run the best way to avoid bullshit emails.
Just last week I finally turned the corner and just thought fuck it, unsubscribing may be the “right” thing to do in some kind of ideal sense but it’s just a waste of time. Just mark it as spam and move on.
You’re braver than me… Most of the time “unsubscribe” is actually a signal that the spam was received by a mailbox with a live human reading it, and they automatically sign you up for several other mailing lists.
I don’t think this is really true.
The vast majority of mailing lists these days are run by mailchimp or whoever who have an active interest in avoiding spamming people who have opted out.
Also, what’s the point of sending spam emails to the type of person who unsubscribes from mailing lists? It costs nothing to send an email. Spammers don’t care whether there’s a live human at a specific address. I think if you trimmed your list to only people who had unsubscribed, you’d get a lower hit ratio than just sending to any address you can get your hands on.
The typical benefit to spammers for someone clicking the links within an email is to find out if a live person is watching them, or if the email address is still active. The people who sell address lists to spammers can actually charge more if their list is “confirmed” good active mailboxes. What good is a million email addresses if 50% or more of them go to abandoned mailboxes? But if you can pay the same price for 100,000 confirmed addresses and you get even a 1% response rate, it was money well-spent (and the seller passes your confirmed email on to a couple dozen other unscrupulous spammers).
I hate marketing emails and never willingly signed up for any of the ones I’m complaining about. It’s always been a case of a hidden box or a sudden decision to create a new type of email and opt me in automatically. That’s why I popped the question here.
The unsubscribes? Or the “I never signed up for this” count
On the unsub front, only ~30% of our mailing list engages with sends (opens the email), and I’m willing to bet up to 50% of our mailing list is “dead” emails, so really it’s 2-3x that number in practice. We have CASL to comply with so we aren’t willy nilly with adding people to our list either.
For the program we distribute we require a manual opt-in that is not mentioned on any page.
I respect you
“About 0.2% of people unsubscribe every time we send something out”
Oh hey that’s me!
My email is commonly used by people in other countries who are either too stupid to know their own or maliciously doing it. I mark as spam and opt out of countless things I never signed up for.
I’m sorry, I can’t answer your question, but I have experienced companies lying about their email marketing opt-ins.
I placed an order with a company (it was the NEC in Birmingham) and distinctly remember clicking the “I do not consent” box and got emails anyways. I contacted them and asked them to look into it, guessing it was a bug. They got back to me and said it wasn’t possible for that to happen, and I must have misremembered.
I signed up for a new account, explicitly ensuring I was opting out from emails, with a fresh email address then logged in to check my communication preferences - the account was opted in.
I contacted them with this information and they basically wrote me back apologising that I had been misinformed, but letting me know that they were still legally in the clear and that the checkbox was actually just a “nicety” that they didn’t need, and that they relied on legitimate interest rather than user consent for marketing.
In my country the checkbox must be for opt-in. And it must start off unchecked.
Red Funnel Ferries recently sent a survey to, from the looks of it, everyone who had ever booked online with them.
My guess is that they gave the “wrong” email database to the survey company. The one that for GDPR reasons, probably wasn’t supposed to exist any more.
Because I don’t always remember, I take screenshots every time I uncheck a box like that.
I mark any email that I didn’t intend to sign up for as spam, and I never intentionally sign up for emails from companies.
If Gmail offers a “mark as spam and unsubscribe” option, I use it.
I hope that adds just the tiniest push for Google to automatically mark these types of emails as spam and encourage companies to do better.
But then, I do this maybe once a month with Google’s own emails, so 🤷.
Nobody signs up for spam. They just get the old “Don’t click here if you don’t want not to be never contacted about special offers!” box the wrong way round.
I’m very diligent about this and still get signed up for spam emails after buying products from companies.
I click unsubscribe if they don’t make the sign in… If it’s too much work, I just put a mail filter. In thunderbird all this stuff is easy to do.
I also use fastmails multiple identities so I can just delete some identify that is getting spam. Problem gone.
Not a lot of companies actually look at/care about that metric.
It’s more there for the providers of the email sending to identify spammy customers who are using it to hit up people without an actual business relationship to them.
I work at a small SaaS company that sells software to Higher Ed. Our marketing email is entirely separate from our product email. The marketing emails are a nuisance and I don’t have a lot of info on them. The product emails I have to monitor the bounce rate and complaint rate to keep our email reputation up and ensure deliverability.
People still check the box that they didn’t sign up for email even though every email sent out of the product is opt-in. I assume it’s usually because someone’s boss decided they needed to get a specific email report or something.
Our complaint rate is still super low though, lower than .01%.
People still check the box that they didn’t sign up for email even though every email sent out of the product is opt-in
Do you think it’s just people moving on from their role ? Oh Bob has left, let’s just forward all his emails to Bill…
I think some of the data in the reports that people subscribe to is only useful for a limited time window, and then eventually people are getting weekly emails with information they no longer need (or is no longer valid). People then unsubscribe to the entire ‘report’ notification type instead of the individual report. Ideally development will make that easier to manage within the product in the future.
I never click a box to tell them why. Fuck their analytics.
I’m not an emailer, but I always mark mass marketing emails as spam because I never sign up for any email lists.
