Survey
Retail
Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study: Executive Summary
While major online retailers do a great job of
honoring unsubscribe requests quickly, there’s
plenty of room for their opt-out processes to
improve—most notably in the areas of providing
subscribers with alternatives to opting out and of
lowering barriers to opting out. For instance, only
66% of retailers use their opt-out processes to
engage subscribers in order to address the issue
causing them to want to opt out—and few do more than
a superficial job of it. When looking at opt-out
barriers, only 9% of major online retailers employ a
one-click unsubscribe process, while another 35%
easily could, but don’t.
Those are a couple of the key findings of Email
Experience Council’s first annual Retail Email
Unsubscribe Benchmark Study, which looked at the
opt-out practices of 94 major online retailers. The
study looks at trends in the opt-out process itself,
including the alternatives to opting out, opt-out
methods and friction in the unsubscribe process; and
examines the honoring of opt-out requests, including
CAN-SPAM compliance.
“Email is a relationship channel, and opting out of
the relationship is just another step in the
lifecycle,” says Kara Trivunovic, director of
strategic services at Premiere Global Services Inc.,
the sponsor of this study. “Ignore it at your own
peril.”
Increasingly one of the most important benchmarks
for your unsubscribe process should be the single
click of the “report spam” button. Some consumers
already regularly use it to unsubscribe from email
that they no longer want. So if your process becomes
confusing or cumbersome, consumers know they have an
easy-to-use fallback. That makes it more important
than ever to have a frictionless opt-out process.
It also makes it more important to honor opt-out
requests quickly, as delays increasingly look like
failures. Thankfully, more than 86% of retailers
honored opt-outs within 3 days, with most of them
effective immediately, as evidenced by the number of
emails received after opting out. Another 4% honored
opt-outs within 7 days, and 3% more within 14 days.
One percent took more than the CAN-SPAM-sanctioned
14 days to honor unsubscribes, and another 3% of
retailers had their opt-out processes fail.
Other key findings from the study include:
• 73% of retailers sent no more emails after
receiving an opt-out request.
• 16% of retailers give those trying to opt-out an
opportunity to reduced the frequency at which they
receive emails.
• 17% of retailers solicited feedback from those
that had opted out.
• 4% of retailers were in violation of the CAN-SPAM
Act of 2003 by either failing to honor opt-outs or
taking longer than 10 business days to do so.
---Source: Retail Email Jan.
2008.
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