this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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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 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.