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).
Just the real spammers do this tho. Legitimate shops and other businesses will unsubscribe you. I know this, because my company has many legitimate EU businesses for customers and we often help with their mails and databases. Unsubscribe is an important feature, rarely breaks and is respected when mailing automatically from common shop software as well as when they export lists of emails for complex mailings (like individual voucher codes). It’s a common request to get a list of users subscribed to a newsletter.
Oh sure, I get it. The problem is determining who is legitimate and who isn’t. Since I never requested any of these spams, and even legitimate businesses will frequently send you messages even when you carefully opt out of their offer to send that spam, it’s pretty much a waste of time to bother playing these stupid games with any of them (at least in the US). If we didn’t have politicians hell-bent on stripping us of even the hard-won internet protections we’ve managed to obtain, then maybe the unsubscribe button would actually mean something here.
It’s a common request to get a list of users subscribed to a newsletter.
It also may be commonly illegal in some countries.
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.
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.
In my country the checkbox must be for opt-in. And it must start off unchecked.
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 🤷.
Not an answer to your question, but yesterday I was annoyed that I unsubscribed to an email list and there wasn’t an option to select that I never signed up for it. My email address has my first initial in it - and my user name does not stand for JulieBalls, seeing that my name isn’t Julie. However, that doesn’t stop Julie for signing me up for all sorts of shitty emails like “Hi Julie, Rand Paul needs your support to fight Facist Fauci”, “Julie, this is Reverend Fuck Knuckles and I need you to pray for Trump”, etc.
When I unsubscribe from these lists they usually make me select an option like “I’m no longer interested in this content.” I’m like “bitch, I was never interested in your trash-ass content!”
My mum always gives her email address as her full name @gmail.com
She doesn’t have an email account with gmail. She had a work email account but retired years ago. She’s never signed up for it. Chances are somebody else took it a long time ago. But she just thinks this is how emails work. It’s how mine looks. Why wouldn’t hers be similar? So anytime anybody asks for an email, that’s who gets it. Some poor woman in another country quietly marking doctors appointments as spam.
Yeah, I have some yank doing that to me regularly on my email address. She has kids, and a car. Get a lot of car repair and rego emails. And childcare emails. I emailed her kids child care to tell them I wasn’t in the US, didn’t have kids, and couldn’t find their unsubscribe button. They sent me irate messages back telling me that her poor toddlers would be sent home if I kept sending things like that… I told them it was a major security risk to send such emails to an unconfirmed email to a random stranger overseas. They eventually got the hint, or possibly phoned the mother, as they eventually shut up, but it took a few tries over several weeks.
I often wonder about her, but she is impossible to communicate with directly. I just get her mail, but have nowhere to forward it to.
My lady has signed up for Care.com to be a nanny, and I frequently get inquiries from families looking to hire her. But yeah, I have no way of actually getting this info to her, since I don’t know her real address. I considered doing a password reset to make her have to get another account, but I wasn’t sure about the ethics and legalities of that.
Your mom and Julie are probably best friends, cause that’s exactly what’s happening with my email account. It’s like every 6 months, she signs up for something new. I’m guessing she must be confused when she never gets the communication she signed up for? But she probably has a very loose understanding of how email actually works.
Yeah, I’ve been signed up for businesses in various US states by people who share my name. This must be what they’re doing. Sometimes I even get sent receipts and insurance policy documents.
I was on Gmail back in the invite-only days, so I got a good address. By now, I have had about a dozen different people do this to me. Some are very persistent in believing that my address is theirs.
I had one couple who used my address for everything. They ordered a laptop with my email. ITunes, Netflix, disney+. They’d signed up for USPS’s informed delivery with my account. I could have stolen so much shit from them over the years. But I always tried to correct the issue.
It finally stopped when they used my email for their wedding registry. Instead of trying once again to do the right thing, I logged into the registry, removed all of their tasteful items, added a faux tigerskin rug (the kind with the whole head at one end), a bunch of this jewel-tone stuffed curvy furniture that would be perfect for a 70s fuckroom, clown-themed carnival games, a popcorn cart, and a shitload of baby items.
God that sounds wonderful! Quality malicious prank
Same here. Still blows my mind though. Like do these people think if they just write down an address, then it’s magically theirs?
The amount of people who think that their email is only accessible on one computer (as if it were a literal mailbox) actually leads me to believe that yes, many people probably are this dumb.
Does not help that before webmail and IMAP or whatever it basically did work this way lol
I wonder this often.
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.
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.
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.
If they’re using a service to send the emails, like SendGrid or Mailchimp or something, that Unsubscribe survey is actually hosted by the email sending provider, and the more people that mark the email as spam or use the “I never signed up for this” option or similar, the worse it makes the user of the mail sending service look. If they used Sendgrid for example to send a mass email to 10k people, if more than 5% Unsubscribe or mark as spam or use the “I never signed up for this”, the company might get their account locked down by Sendgrid until there’s an investigation as to why they sent spam.
Professional marketer here, all of the unsub rates in this thread look nominal (0.1-0.2%).
Also, when we run third party distribution campaigns, a large amount of people, I can look at their hotjar journey and watch in real time their mouse movements as they download a whitepaper, then we call them and they say they never downloaded it.
It’s a mix of lying to the annoying marketing company (I get it), and just plain forgetting you did it.
I switched from Hearthstone Deck Tracker to Firestone Deck Tracker yesterday, I’m not entirely sure if I checked to see I wasn’t signing up for marketing emails, it’s that easy.
Not to mention, I can buy just about any non-EU email address i want on demand.
Not to mention, I can buy just about any non-EU email address i want on demand.
That such a marketplace exists is a major annoyance.
And it is the reason email is dead as a private communication tool for so many people.
I see “email is dead” a lot. It’s not. I use it every day and so do most people.
It’d be a nightmare to conduct everything I do via email via whatsapp or Jira or Instagram messenger…
This might be hard to believe for those who say that, but I still email my friends. I’m 30 years old, decided to let go of all social media, and other friends enjoy sitting to focus for a few minutes and write something thoughtful. Depending on the country you live in, most communication with authorities or services will be via email.
Email is really the only mainstream communication medium that’s not owned by some shitty company or other.
But good to know that there’s a line between that and EU mails. Glad the EU legislated that away.
Also, when we run third party distribution campaigns, a large amount of people, I can look at their hotjar journey and watch in real time their mouse movements as they download a whitepaper, then we call them and they say they never downloaded it.
This shit pisses me off. If I’m forced to enter my e-mail address to download a white paper, that should not be considered consent to spam me. My company gates our whitepapers behind e-mail/personal details as well. I just put in my marketing team’s personal contact info when I have to download something from our own website. Make them eat their own shit.
thats funny but if you gave me a real name and a fake email, it gets run through data normalization and I’d likely get your real email.
If you just give me the company name, fake name and email, it’s possible that if you met our qualification procedure, we’d just dig out the best looking person at the company (head of department, procurement manager, vice president?) and start contacting them based on “institutional buying intent.”
I’m sure you don’t care, hear it all the time, and/or have no authority to change things, but this is shitty behavior on your industry’s part. Just leave people alone!
Edit: I do appreciate you sharing these insights with all of us!
I mean I’m emailing you twice a week at your work email address for 6 weeks about a product to help you with reducing costs on a certain business function, and making sure you see ads for my company when you would see ads for a different company, and someone pays me money to do it.
I dont touch any personal emails, so I don’t really consider it immoral to email you about your job at your job.
But I’m not giving you explicit consent to spam me??? You’re gating content behind me giving up an e-mail address and then pretending like that’s consent. Or worse, going and buying my e-mail from someone else. This is the part I find immoral.
And you’re being disingenuous here. You’re not “e-mailing me about my job”, you’re spamming lame brochures that I never explicitly consented to receiving. Whether you think that’s immoral or not, don’t attempt to rephrase it as if it’s some great service you’re doing me.
Edit:
I mean I’m emailing you twice a week at your work email address for 6 weeks about a product
I don’t want you to e-mail me at all, but oh. my. god. one e-mail is enough. I don’t need 11 more! Wtf?
Thanks. I find the gall of some people surprising. Thats why I always use „hide my email“ and some random names for things that I don’t intend on using like one time signups for whitepapers. These people are indoctrinated to put money over people. You wont change them but you can just act in bad faith as they do.
You are giving me explicit consent, though, as payment for downloading a whitepaper. Your options are to opt out at point of sign up, or at any point after that, or, of course, not download the paper
Or if you’ve been prospected, I have to maintain a reason for emailing you in the CRM, and I’d invite you to consider the ramifications of “businesses can’t contact other businesses.” What if you need your windows cleaned? Or your fleet vehicles need to have their tires checked? Or you need a new warehouse to expand your business?
You personally in your every day role may not want that, but businesses, in general, do.
I am emailing you about your job if you are in charge of expensive ($10MM+) software applications and are interested in downsizing your compute and storage costs. Are you those things? If you are a CDAO of a billion dollar company, you probably would like to consider the product I work for.
You are giving me explicit consent, though, as payment for downloading a whitepaper.
You don’t understand the word “explicit” do you? Unless I check a box that says “please send me bullshit”, I am not explicitly giving you consent to send me bullshit. You’re also not giving me an option to pay for the whitepaper to avoid being sent bullshit.
Or if you’ve been prospected, I have to maintain a reason for emailing you in the CRM, and I’d invite you to consider the ramifications of “businesses can’t contact other businesses.”
The ramifications are that your shitty industry dies over night, and I’m okay with it.
What if you need your windows cleaned? Or your fleet vehicles need to have their tires checked? Or you need a new warehouse to expand your business?
Okay, now I’ve lost respect for you as a person. If I need any of that I’m going to ask my peers for references because I trust references way more than some jackass sending me the same e-mail 12 times over 6 weeks. If I can’t get references, them I’m going to use a search engine. Did you forget that exists?
You personally in your every day role may not want that, but businesses, in general, do.
But for all your bragging about being able to drill down and locate very specific individuals, none of you drill down and search by “this person in particular NEVER responds positively to spam”. So until you start doing that, I’m affected by your immoral practices and I get an opinion too, whether you like my opinion or not.
I am emailing you about your job if you are in charge of expensive ($10MM+) software applications and are interested in downsizing your compute and storage costs. Are you those things? If you are a CDAO of a billion dollar company, you probably would like to consider the product I work for.
We’re having a conversation about your industry in general. Not whatever goalpost you move the conversation to.
It’s clear to me from this conversation that your industry is not able to morally justify themselves and instead of owning your shitty behavior you have convinced yourselves that you’re doing people a service. You are not good people. :(
Also, I did notice you conveniently ignoring my comments on sending 12 freaking e-mails. I’d love to see you justify that nonsense.
If I’m a CDAO of a billion dollar company, I’ve already delegated that cost reduction effort to someone else and your type of unscrupulous spray and pray marketing is exactly what I’ve told them to avoid once they see it.
I work in IT, and routinely blacklist vendors, block their corporate email domains, phone number blocks, etc., once I find they are doing this targeting toward my company in hopes of landing “the right decision maker” to talk to. If your product is good and worth it, and we actually need or want it, you don’t need that type of sales/marketing tactic to get in the door.
Your game is the reason I love that my company has an email filtering platfo9rm that tags “bulk” email and I just send all of it to trash with a rule. If your email is all fancy HTML and inline CSS to make it look flashy, not a chance I’m seeing it.
I mean I’m emailing you twice a week at your work email address for 6 weeks about a product
What the fuck that’s so often!
its really not, it sounds like a lot but compared to BoFu activities where a BDR will call you every couple of days, it’s on the low end.
I can buy just about any non-EU email address i want on demand.
What does this mean? Like, you can just point to a random person and pay someone to get you their email?
yep
ZoomInfo, Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Lusha, Salesloft, Gong, Cognism, Gartner, G2, Voila Norbert, Hunter, FindThatLead, Prospect io, Hubspot Sales Hub…
Some examples, “Get me the email address of the VP of ITOps at every company who had series C and beyond funding in Q1 of 2022” - done. “Get me the email of the Head of Business Intelligence at Acme Ltd’s Ohio office” - done. “Get me the email of Tim Smith, he works in Sales at Nike” - done.
Roughly $3/person
Also, when we run third party distribution campaigns, a large amount of people, I can look at their hotjar journey and watch in real time their mouse movements as they download a whitepaper, then we call them and they say they never downloaded it.
Can you elaborate a bit on this?
If I’m understanding you correctly, you send out marketing stuff via email, and then you call the ones who clicked through to the landing page did whatever?
Not the person you are replying to you, but I used to do email marketing for JP Morgan long time ago and we could provide heat maps of where people’s mouses were hovering most of the time on our emails and people higher up than me would use that information to tell me where to lay out the links so that people might accidentally click links and get a better click-through rate
nowadays, fwiw, a lot of software filters out scam, accidental, bot, and rageclicks, because you want to prioritize actual buying intent.
yes. Some of the data is anonymized but there are ways around it (i.e. someone downloaded something at 2am and they were the only user, I can work out it’s you from the time stamps)
But I can watch your mouse move around the screen as if I was filming you with my phone (obviously only your mouse pointer, I can’t see your other windows or into your bedroom etc)
edit: you were asking something slightly different, yes I absolutely can see if you clicked on my email.
For some big important people, I can even get a push notification to my phone if you visit my webpage.
I understand how it works, I’m really just surprised that you’re talking about it the way you are - like this is some amazing skill set employed by “professional marketers”.
I can watch your mouse move around the screen as if I was filming you with my phone
Not my mouse obviously because hotjar will obey “do not track” flags from browsers, but ublock will prevent the hotjar script from loading, and prevent sending any telemetry.
edit: actually I think my main point is that you would call hapless fools that clicked through. IMO this crosses the line from being a spammer to some thing more… scammy. When someone clicks on a link in your email most of them are not aware that their action will be used to profile them as a hotter lead.
I dont know what you mean by “the way i’m talking about it” I’m just describing the function to someone who was unfamiliar with the technology.
Yes, if you deliberately block a piece of software it doesn’t work. I was using “I can see your” to mean “I can see any given person’s” with the caveat of that person not deliberately blocking it, I figured that was taken as read.
There’s more to building out this kind of functionality, including dynamic IDs on clickable elements, A/B testing colors, CTA text, dynamic personalization, client mini-sites, first- and last- click attribution, full funnel attribution, lead scoring and so on…
None of it is crazy if you know how to do it, same with fixing a car, building a cabinet, coding an app or cooking a meal.
However, it’s interesting to me that you scorn how obvious this technology is and easy to use, and then close that most people don’t know about email pixels, cookies (or cookieless server side tracking), and lead scoring. But to call it “scammy” like I’m doing something that literally every business does, including mom and pop stores and amateur dramatic societies, is a little unfair.
Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just talking about what happens in general terms.
Most businesses do not spam potential customers. Any business that provides actual value to its customers doesn’t need to do this.
Honestly it’s infuriating that you think these shady sales tactics are normal or appropriate.
As an aside, marketing involves augmenting products and services so they’re better embraced by various markets.
Sending emails is something else.
I’m curious about this. Can you name a B2B company that doesn’t?
Most businesses do not spam potential customers
Depends on how you define spam. A few personalised emails (maybe they were missed? happened to me) with an opt out button, an opt in button and a personalised landing page are nothing crazy.
However it becomes crazy when you track mouse movements, send twelve mails in six weeks, employ ‘dark’ surveillance marketing tactics and relentlessly bite the leg of anyone who remotely looks like they can be pressured into a contract.
So sending a few emails is fine in a business context, but @funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works’s company is way overdoing it.
I guess the context is important, and I’m willing to admit that I’m an idealist with unrealistic expectations, but if there’s something being sold and it’s not something I requested then it’s spam IMO, even in a business context.
A few personalised emails
They’re never personalised. Anyone who knows me well enough to actually “personalise” an email would just call.
Everyone’s jumping on this “12 times in 2 weeks” thing. I think you should count the number of emails you get from certain companies and I think you’ll find that any sufficiently large company has emailed you more than 12 times.
Amazon emailed me 15 times this week alone. LinkedIn Emailed me 50 times in August.
None of it is crazy if you know how to do it, same with fixing a car, building a cabinet, coding an app or cooking a meal.
I personally know how most of that works, but as a software developer I would refuse or tone it waaaaaay down if someone wanted me to code something like that. Most of that is unnecessary and evil, and probably illegal in some countries.
If I had to code something like this I would have a call to action button with a signup for more info and possibly a personalised email with a personalised landing page. You don’t need to surveil someone to know if they are interested in your product.
Thank you for the insights into your industry.
I really think a lot of people here are blowing this out of proportion. I don’t see how whether testing if red or green is better is “evil.”
Or knowing if people click on the button on the top level menu, or the hero banner is “evil.”
I think that’s a touch hyperbolic.
But also, you say “personalized landing page” as if that’s different. But you just designated “tracking” as “evil” - that’s what personalization is. What you proposed as an alternative is just as “evil” as the general functions of a website.
I really think a lot of people here are blowing this out of proportion. I don’t see how whether testing if red or green is better is “evil.”
That’s not what I have an issue with. I specifically told you which behaviour I find acceptable and which I don’t find acceptable. If you didn’t read that, I’ll just repeat it for you:
Depends on how you define spam. A few personalised emails (maybe they were missed? happened to me) with an opt out button, an opt in button and a personalised landing page are nothing crazy.
However it becomes crazy when you track mouse movements, send twelve mails in six weeks, employ ‘dark’ surveillance marketing tactics and relentlessly bite the leg of anyone who remotely looks like they can be pressured into a contract.
I’m not an emailer, but I always mark mass marketing emails as spam because I never sign up for any email lists.
Nobody, but our company delivers extremely niche health insurance market information exclusively to paid clients. Absolutely none of our clients are getting emails they didn’t ask for and if their preferences change we have an extremely robust and granular interest system that we adjust to make sure they’re getting everything they want the way they want.
It’s a very different business from those assholes that require you to subscribe to their marketing bullshit to use their service though. In my personal life I’ve opted in to subscribing to about dozen things voluntarily… everything else gets spam marked.
