About three weeks ago I finally started to do what I had in mind for a while already. I started to unsubscribe all newsletters I’m receiving. Whenever I receive a newsletter nowadays I’m not pressing ‘delete’ but instead I’m looking for the ‘unsubscribe’ link and click it. Year long experience proves that I’m never reading any newsletters.

What an experience! First of all I wasn’t aware at all how many newsletters I’m subscribed to receive (whether I intentionally subscribed or got onto the list for some other reason). I keep unsubscribing every day but next morning I have yet one or two other newsletters in my inbox. However, I’m pretty sure I will be able to conclude the whole execercise after about one month when all the monthly newsletters have been delivered.

From a marketing point of view it is also very interesting to see how the different means to unsubscribe are implemented:

-          Worst are the newsletters that don’t provide an unsubscribe link at all (I have one)

-          Really bad are those where you must remember your (perhaps very old) credentials to login and navigate to your account settings on a certain page.

-          A bit shaky are the implementations asking you to send an email message to a certain account – possibly with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject. This is really old style and not state of the art.

-          Many newsletters do it the right way. One click and a website simply confirm the transaction.

-          Some send you a confirmation message. This means I’m saying: “Don’t send me more email anymore” - They respond with yet another email notification. The positive is that this is increasing the security – what if someone else did unsubscribe on behalf of me (this would be something like a friendly hacker)?

-          Best is lufthansa. They offer the ‘one click unsubscribe link’ but they also ask (optionally) for the reasons why I’m unsubscribing. This is good marketing because they can learn from their customers.

 Urs