Handling Unsubscribe Requests

When someone wants off of your list, what do you do? Obviously, the answer is “remove them.” Just as important a consideration is “How do you go about doing that?”

Commercial email is an animal all to itself. If you have a falling out with your best friend, you just stop emailing them. But the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 places legal strictures on commercial email.

What does the law say about removing people from your list? It’s pretty simple, really. CAN-SPAM demands that:

1. You have a working unsubscription mechanism.
2. For every email you send, that mechanism must remain functional for at least 30 days after the mail is sent.
3. You process removal requests promptly, defined as no later than ten (10) business days after the receipt of the request.

Outside of that there isn’t a whole lot of guidance out there. I found a blog post¹ this morning that purports to describe unsubscribe best practices. But some of those “best practices” may not be best.

Consider this bit, for example:

First, offer them the option to reduce frequency on the first page of the unsubscribe process and include the option for them to supply feedback.

I would caution people to keep their unsubscribe processes on one page. It’s been a requirement of CAN-SPAM² since 2008. It’s fine (and I believe it's best practice) to offer more options on that one page, like reducing frequency, but the requirement is that the process not require visiting more than one page.

Send an email confirming the unsubscribe (denote this as part of the website language), be sure to include:

• Contact information for your organization’s customer service department (in case they have any problems)
• A re-subscribe link
• An "Are you Sure" Banner/ link that includes the available specials, rates, your sales outlet or unique promotion – you’ll be surprised at the number of people that unsubscribe and then visit the specials section.

If you are going to confirm someone has left your list and still want to do the rest of this, it needs to be low-key. The key to determining whether something is transactional (as an unsubscription confirmation would be) or commercial is the term “primary purpose.”³ This term appears in the statutory definition of a “transactional or relationship message.”

⁴

The FTC determines primary purpose the same way you would in any other context. They look at the email as a whole and consider what the purpose of sending it was.

Yes, I know lots of people look to a so-called “20% Rule” to make this determination. And I’ve covered my objections⁵ to this in the past. But think of it this way: If someone takes you to lunch, spends an hour chit-chatting, and then spends 5 minutes talking about something work-related, what would you say was the primary purpose of the visit? Do you think they expensed that as a work-related lunch?

The upshot is that you need to make it as clear as possible that your unsubscribe confirmation email is just that: a confirmation that someone has unsubscribed. Otherwise, you can end up in a legal position where you have to look extremely silly: your re-engagement/marketing/unsubscription confirmation message would need its own unsubscription option.

Additionally, there’s this bit of advice:

If you can, copy a CSR on the confirmation email to the recipient. Offer the recipient the opportunity to mail you suggestions and (if the info is available) have the CSR follow up with the recipient that unsubscribed by phone. You never know what you’ll learn or if you can win them back.

In talking with one of the people in charge of things at a major ISP about this post, it was pointed out to me:

I do block senders I find doing such stupid things. And if a CSR rep called me over an unsub it might just get that mailer my personal attention.

I’m sure you can tell that this level of “personal attention” is not what you really want when you’re mailing.

This all, of course, comes down to one simple point that I made in 2008:⁶ “Just because you read it on the Internet doesn’t make it so.”