On the broadband information website I run, we provide users with various options to subscribe to e-mails which for example send them reminders each month if they haven’t rated their broadband service provider, weekly news summaries, or notifications of new posts on the forums. Users have always been able to subscribe/unsubscribe from these automatically on the website, but admittedly this was in various parts and not exactly easy.

So, a few months ago we built this generic unsubscribe form which allows users to type in their e-mail address, receive an e-mail with a new link (with a code) which verifies they are the authentic user of the e-mail address, and then they can select what to unsubscribe from, click Unsubscribe and it’s all done from various systems in one go:

thinkbroadband.com – screenshot of ‘unsubscribe’ page

Now you’d think this should stop all the e-mails from users every week after they get our weekly news summary on Monday morning asking to be removed from the list.. Well.. No..

It’s resulted in e-mails like this:

“I want to stay in subscription and would to take the opportunity to thank you for a great and useful service”

“Please DO NOT Unsubscribe Me The Link was Clicked in Error.”

..and so on. Obviously users would only be removed after going through the verification process so most of these people haven’t actually unsubscribed themselves.

Clearly we have something to learn on the user interface front which we’ve not quite tweaked yet

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 8:33 pm and is filed under annoyances.blog, general.blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.