Making it easy for your Hotmail recipients to unsubscribe
Posted by David Greiner on September 17, 2007
We mentioned a few months back that the Hotmail folks were about to launch a very cool new feature that allowed your recipients to unsubscribe directly from the Hotmail interface. As you know, if a subscriber no longer wants to hear from you they've got 2 options - mark it as spam or try and find the unsubscribe link.
This new feature goes a long way towards reducing false positive spam complaints by encouraging your recipients to take the unsubscribe option instead. If you've ever recieved spam complaints from your Hotmail recipients, you'll know just how important this is. Here's what your Hotmail recipients will now see:
When your subscriber clicks the unsubscribe link, they'll be redirected to your unsubscribe confirmation page, just like they would if they clicked the regular unsubscribe link in your email content. The best part is, you don't need to do anything to set this up, it will work automatically for all your Hotmail recipients.
The unsubscribe option will be visible to every subscriber that's marked you as a safe sender (or added you to their contacts). Luckily this is a very easy process in the new Hotmail interface and is likely something a subscriber will do for any newsletters they subscribe to. Here's a quick screenshot of how this looks for all new senders.
The moment "Mark as safe" is clicked, the unsubscribe option will be available in any emails you send them. Props need to go to Microsoft for being the first major ISP to implement this great standard.
2 comments so far
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Blaze
wrote on September 18, 2007 11:25 PM
Good work guys. It's good to see how forward thinking and proactive in adding new features. I'm glad to trust my mail delivery to the experts :)
KiNG Tipping
wrote on November 28, 2007 1:46 PM
Excellent idea - our website for the Melbourne Cup will be using this feature ASAP. I hope Gmail and yahoo adopt this standard too.
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