Why do some companies take so long to process unsubscribes?

October 27, 2011

This morning I received one of those daily deals emails from a well-known online travel company. Seeing as I haven't been wearing my traveling pants as of late, I decided I'd unsubscribe from this one, only to trip across the following clause:

Unsubscribe message

Now, for a business that automates a lot of what it does so well, a 5-10 day wait on processing an unsubscribe seems pretty unusual. Does this message mean that I'll be receiving daily emails for 5-10 days to come? Perhaps more importantly, why don't they just use an immediate unsubscribe process like the rest of us?

Now, it's true that the CAN-SPAM Act requires that opt-outs are honored within 10 days. But given that databases can be updated immediately, this sort of move demonstrates a certain one-sidedness to the customer relationship. It's a bit like them saying:

'We'll be awesome to you if you give us your business and your personal details. But ask us to do something that doesn't benefit our bottom line and we'll sit on it for a few days.'

The absolute worst-case of unsubscribe deferral I've seen was from an airline who stated that would take up to 20 days to be removed from their list. Given that they were capable of immediately bombarding customers with confirmation emails and offers on signup, it was a little irksome that they applied such a leisurely attitude to managing unsubscribes. Even if this process involved updating a spreadsheet of email addresses by hand or working with a 3rd-party company to manage their lists, pretty much anyone could agree that they were taking their sweet time to get a fairly simple task done.

So now it's over to you. Why do you think some companies take so long to manage unsubscribe requests? What's the longest delay you've experienced?

Posted in: Observations & Answers

6 Comments

T
October 27, 2011 9:29am

As we do a lot of advanced segmentation, we have to make manual selections directly from our SQL database. These are usually done a day in advance. That’s why we have a 36 hour unsubscribe period
Jonathan Loriaux
October 27, 2011 11:20am

I think that this delay is mainly due to the complexity of the management between the CRM database, the CMS database, the routing tool, etc ... And unfortunately, this “IT” complexity gain the upper hand ...
Elliott F.
October 27, 2011 3:54pm

i see this in other areas too. for example look how quick you can sign up to a service and start paying a recurring fee, but when you want to cancel you have to either call or write up an email explaining that you want to cancel.

as for the unsubscription, i remember it was very difficult to stop getting emails from Groupon. after the initial request, i had to start sending emails to their office to make sure they remove me.
James Lamb
October 27, 2011 3:58pm

Jonathan has it right.

Because we use a vendor, if they unsubscribe from an email, it takes effect immediately. But the email production staff are technical people in the marketing group—therefore, they are misunderstood by marketing and ignored by IT. That means our best efforts to get unsubscribes back to the CRM (or opt-outs done elsewhere on the website) are only passed back and forth once a week. It’s a real pain based on the email production getting low priority and being too busy to fight for anything better.

This level of fragmentation of systems, complexity of systems, lack of resources have caused us to have to be really creative. We actually had to build our own middleware on the reporting database (cloned weekly) to reconciles an email-address-as-unique against the CRM (account number as unique, email address duplication isn’t a problem). And that also then gets data (downloaded weekly) from our vendor for every single piece of activity. We end up with a more comprehensive accounting of customer interactions than the CRM because their system can’t handle all the data points (or volume of data) that we have in our middleware.

The good news is that the rest of the organization is realizing that we have information and data-interconnectivity that gives us a level of intelligence beyond theirs and they’re now coming to us for segmentation and key data that they want to move back into the CRM. But even then, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. It’s unlikely to get to that desired instantaneously 360 view of the email address owner.
Ros Hodgekiss
October 28, 2011 3:14am

Thank you everyone for your responses - it’s been a huge eye-opener and I’m really learning something myself, here! On a similar note, the folks over at Email Fail have set a new record - 28 days to process an unsubscribe. What’s the longest you’ve been quoted?
Josh
November 6, 2011 1:00am

This post is brilliant. Both in its pimping of instant unsubscribe of campaign monitor and its assumption that it is just because they are slow and suck.

I want to use CM, mailchip or whatever, however because we already run an automatic unsubcribe system. I could not work out a way to remove the forced method that you web based guys use. I already run multiple lists, I don’t want to run yet another one that compares your unsubscribes + my own.

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