Within Magan's Mind

Allow me to retell my unsubscribing story of last month.

For one reason or another, I had myself subscribed to one of eWeek.com’s newsletters. Once my “mission” there was complete, I clicked on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of one of the newsletters. Here is where I ran into my first (yes, there is a second) problem:

First, the link dares to send me to a landing page with a prestitial (advertisement), prompting me to watch it or skip ahead (does this make sense to advertise to someone who is clearly not interested in receiving the site’s newsletters anymore?). Then, I am redirected to a Newsletters Management page, where I am presented with a hefty (and I do mean hefty) list of ALL of their newsletters. This makes it utterly inconvenient for me to unsubscribe as I have to sift through a laundry list of newsletters to find the one(s) from which I want to unsubscribe. Heck, I just tediously checked them all to make sure I was to receive NOTHING from them ever again. Not only that, I have to manually enter my email (use query strings, folks!) and click the unsubscribe button (didn’t I just ask to unsubscribe already?). After taking quite some time going through their unsubscribe process, I was finally done.

I kept receiving their newsletters.

(*Ding! Problem #2.) Oftentimes, it was more than once a day, continuing as it was before. Now, I’m sure most of you would agree with me that when you don’t want something, you don’t want something. Simple enough, eh? My thought on how eWeek.com probably handles their newsletters is that it takes them several days to process the request. Needless to say, I stopped receiving them about a week later.

Conclusions:
• When someone wants to unsubscribe, make it easy on him/her. One click on the unsubscribe link in the newsletter (maybe a quick second on the landing page, if you’re daring) is all it should take.
• Oh, and put it into effect immediately or reasonably within a day or before the next issue comes out. Point being, make sure not another is sent.
• KNOW YOUR SUBSCRIBERS/CUSTOMERS. Don’t have unsubscribers-to-be flocking to a general page. In fact, this goes out to every one.
• Don’t subscribe to any eWeek newsletter unless you truly are a “loyal reader.” Or have lots of time to kill.