Gmail adding prominent 'Unsubscribe' option to marketing emails
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
* You're much better off with a list of people who actually care about your communication and your product, rather than a list of people sort of interested or downright annoyed by you, which haven't unsubscribed because they couldn't find the link.
* Less disinterested subscribers means less costs to send and maintain the list (e.g., via Mailchimp or SES).
* Less spam reports which hurt your email deliverability (get enough of those and you'll be booted off sites like Mailchimp).
* People will have less unwanted commercial communication overall, and will be able to focus on yours (of course I'm talking about the selected group of people who are actually interested).
I welcome this change, and I say this as someone who runs a site that sends 50,000+ 'newsletter' emails per week. This to me is good news.
While this will undoubtedly shrink some email lists, most of those people weren't going to be interested and buy (or whatever the action is) anyway. If you're doing email marketing, you should expect that a certain percentage of people will unsubscribe from any given email not because it's a bad email but they are just no longer interested. Making it more difficult for someone to unsubscribe just increases the likelihood that they'll complain or report it as spam and no one really benefits from that.
Yes, that's where I expect to find it, but that involves scrolling down and reading through a bunch of fine print to find the right thing.
Oh, and I've had plenty of cases of using the unsubscribe link not actually work, or only unsubscribe me from one of the five lists that they autosubscribed me to, that it's hard to trust.
On the other hand, the spam button is right up top, in the same place every time, and easy to click. It's a lot faster and more user friendly, and it generally gives me better results.
A spammer. Before Can-Spam, spammers would always re-use and sell the address of someone who replied to a prior spam mailing, even if the reply was a threat of legal action.
Before Can-Spam, spammers ranked e-mail addresses read by a human higher than dead addresses (no surprise). The economics of spamming dictate that a mailing list of living humans, however acquired and however unlikely to result in sales, will be spammed again and again, simply as a bet that some fool somewhere will respond as the spammer would like.
Now that we have Can-Spam and unsubscribe links must be present, the spammers have changed tactics -- instead of collecting reply addresses known to be read by humans, they collect unsubscribe addresses known to be read by humans. Old wine in new bottles.
> are incredibly unlikely to buy anything from bona fide spam.
Yes, but let's say that an unsophisticated computer user receives, not a simple spam message, but a carefully designed phishing e-mail that is known to fool .1% of its recipients. For that scenario, e-mail addresses acquired as explained above would make perfectly suitable targets.
I can believe that what you're describing has happened before, but it's certainly not endemic. I've never personally seen anything like it.
They're interchangeable activities, and both are fueled by a ready supply of e-mail addresses.
Because that definitely happens.
In those cases I would always just hit the back button and then hit gmail's report as spam button, because fuck that. If any emailer's unsubscribe system is significantly more work for me than reporting as spam, I'm going to report it as spam and not feel the least bit of guilt about it.
(Requiring a password to unsubscribe is not can-spam compliant, by the way)
Define "works"? Does clicking "unsubscribe" for advertiser A stop mails from advertiser A? Yes, probably. But what stops advertiser A from sharing his unsubscribe list with advertiser B? Well, nothing -- it's legal and an advantage if advertiser B reciprocates by sharing his list right back.
There's nothing to keep an advertiser from sharing his "unsubscribe" list with any number of other advertisers -- the only legal requirement is that he not mail you again.
Spammers might be deplorable and slimy, but they're not stupid.
> What you describe is possible, but I really don't think it's at all common.
If it can be done, spammers will do it. I can see you're having a hard time thinking like a bottom-feeder, perfectly understandable, so to help your comprehension, I offer the Miracle Man scam:
The unsubscribe link on "legitimate" marketing emails almost always works. The unsubscribe link on marketing emails that are scams is still used to confirm that the target address is read by a live human and target further scams.
The safe assumption is that any unwanted and unexpected commercial email is, in fact, a scam and treat it as such, as the receiver does not suffer from flagging it as spam.
Obviously, this isn't good for "legitimate" email marketers, but then again, legitimate or not, their emails tend to be a waste of the receivers time and resources, just less actively harmful than the scammers. So, frustrating them as a side effect of an overvigorous defense against scammers is, even if not intended, not something that most users would weigh on the opposite side of the balance from the intended effect.
Prefer an unsubscribe over someone hitting the spam button. If I get too many people marking my mailings as spam, my whole mailing list might be "frozen" until I prove that those people did indeed sign up. Some providers (e.g. Vertical response) even cancel accounts and cancel all existing credits if spam designations exceed 'appropriate' levels.
I always approach people marking my newsletters as spam to explain why this is a problem. If they respond, most do, I use their response (eg 'I left the area') as proof to the provider that they simply meant to unsubscribe...
I tried to do an email campaign about a year ago and it was a nightmare to get good quality subscribers.
I would much rather have 1,000 people who really care about my newsletter than 100,000 that don't.
So, I wonder if this isn't just a move to make an advertisement channel, from which Google extracts no revenue, less effective.
Consider this - the two reasons I originally signed up with Gmail were because of the large mailbox (a feature) and the much more capable spam filtering (a feature). At the time I owned my own domains and had my own choice of web mailboxes on my own site, but there was VALUE to me to pipe all of my mail through Gmail to benefit from these features and then check it there.
One problem I have seen lately is the volume or automated mailings from websites that I gave my email address to _years_ ago has been increasing, and if you ever gave consent for one newsletter in 2005 it feels like you're now subscribed to their weekly update, their monthly update, special deals, hot news items, personalised suggestions, and notifications and you can only seem to unsubscribe from one _mailing_ at a time. You simply can't keep up unsubscribing from all of the people abusing your consent out there. This is a problem with Gmail addresses and non-Gmails alike today.
To me is sounds like Gmail is aware of the problem and trying to solve it in a creative way -> Ubsubscribe using your mailbox, not using their settings :) To me it sounds like another feature that will keep people coming back and choosing Gmail over other mailboxes, and if that's the case then they make more money from ads in the long run :D
Don't be silly. This is hacker news. People are even cynical about self driving cars ("Now they can show ads while you drive!").
For example, I'm pretty sure the hacker news view of Calico is: "Google execs got together in a room and were talking, and realized they had a problem - people keep dying, and they can't show ads to dead people. They needed options, hence they formed a company to fight aging"
Maybe that's not cynical enough, maybe it's "Google is looking for the ultimate incentive to join G+. For every G+ post you make, they extend your life by a month".
In any case, Google essentially can't win. Past a certain point, you do enough stuff that some people don't like it. While you can focus on the user, and slow down how long it takes, you can't please people forever, and once they become cynical, they tend to stay that way.
:)
Don't be silly. This is hacker news.
I am not cynical. I have always wondered why they haven't been more aggressive with respect to such lists. They are potential competition. And, while it would be unethical to filter such mailings, it is in their and in the user's interest to make it easy to unsubscribe from such lists. For users, so that they don't have to go through some annoying steps to unsubscribe, for them to improve their spam filter and to increase the value of GMail ads.
By the way, let's not pretend that many of their choices are made to maximise ad revenue, since that is currently their main source of income. And I think it's perfectly fine. The vast majority wants free services and ads are a good way to monetise them. If you don't want ads and/or data mining, there are good alternatives for a few dollars a month.
I really love Twitch Plays Pokémon, because to my mind it illustrates so well both the beauty and the peril of any sufficiently large corpus of humans. Although at any given point in time it is moving at random, over bigger time scales it is clearly moving with some kind of intentionality. We can't say what Red is doing any given instant in time, but over the past 10 days it is clearly bent on progressing through all the goals in the game.
Anyhow, Google is an advertising company. It moves ads. That is the life blood of the organization. Most big decisions are made directly by the executive team, whose intent you can ascertain directly, but lots of smaller decisions are made by thousands of other people lower on the chain.
Clearly, over the long term, Google is going to optimize towards showing you more and better ads, and I think this move is oriented in that direction. As a rule of thumb, I think Google has a tendency to punish or discourage all forms of non Google advertising.
On the plus side, this right now is clearly a net win for consumers. Sometimes things aren't as crappy as they seem.
This is the part i don't get. Let's ignore this specific case for a second (so this is more of a lament, than a direct response to your argument about this specific case): In general, believing everything is tied to ads shows a distinct lack of imagination on the part of HN people, who by and large i've found to be pretty imaginative. For example, Google has been working on diversification for years, among other things, so why would one assume everything is tied to ads?
To be frank: Does everyone really believe Larry and the executive team are that dumb? That they can't come up with any business strategies that don't involve ads?
OK, well, broadly speaking, Google like all organizations wants to grow. The best source of growth is increasing revenue stream. Advertising, in turn, was 96% of their revenue in ~2012^1.
They're going to try to find other revenue streams. But advertising is clearly not going anywhere.
We're still figuring out how advertising is going to keep working. And honestly, advertising is huge money and is what is driving the fierce battle over mobile at the moment. Here we have what is possibly the last great expansion of fresh eyeballs, and it is crucial for the existing companies to figure out how to serve them ads. Hence Android and the WhatsApp purchase.
So. If you have a feature that in any way can improve upon 96% of their business, that glove will probably fit.
I mean, I doubt Google Cars is seriously so they can show commuters more ads. They have a deep capacity for machine learning, and they bought Boston Dynamics; I'm sure we'll see lots more Google automation in the coming years.
Right now, users getting mail they don't want are faced with a) a familiar, easy to find "mark as spam" button and b) a hard to find unsubscribe link.
This is guaranteed to generate a lot of false spam reports. Is this report of spam actually spam? Or is it just a person who just wants off something they actually signed up for?
An easy way to get a better signal is to make unsubscribing as easy as reporting spam.
From a purely ad perspective, Google doesn't really care if the email is spam or not: they still display ads on the side.
Now, such newsletters are very viable: often you subscribe to them when purchasing a product or getting a freebie. For many users (i.e. my parents) it is very hard to find out how to unsubscribe from them.
Currently, such newsletters are very effective. Sending them doesn't cost you much (from MailChimp to DIY) and you retain a lot of users, since they find it hard to unsubscribe (or don't bother). It doesn't really matter that Google adds advertisements besides such e-mail, because if I had a list, I have already slipped my advertisement into a user's mailbox for free.
Making it easy to unsubscribe from such mailings makes them less effective: it will become harder to retain a communication channel to potential customers, since more of them will unsubscribe. So, Google Ads become more attractive as an advertisement tool, evenmore because users cannot unsubscribe them (short of using an ad blocker).
What's worse is some places will re-add you to their lists every time you buy from them again. (I'm looking at you Moviefone.com!) I already unsubscribed. Why the @$#% are you re-subscribing me? It's not effective at all. It makes me never want to use your service again, which is what I've done with Moviefone.
Many people, it seems, haven't noticed that google is now placing ads in your "promotions" tab that look just like email: http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/07/theres-easy-way-es...
1. If I'm highly confident it's spam, mark it as spam. (Very rare necessity singe gmail catches spam pretty well).
2. Otherwise it's something I have subscribed for, perhaps without noticing (opt-in by default from some service I have used). Look for the Unsubscribe link, click it.
2.1. If the Unsubscribe link IMMEDIATELY unsubscribes me (landing in a page that just confirms I'm already unsubscribed), ok, then just delete the email.
2.2. But if ANY additional interaction is required--choosing a reason for unsubscription, having to click another button--after finishing this, I will also punish the sender by going back to gmail and mark the email as spam.
Obviously I am unsubscribing because I never subscribed in the first place!
Depending on how completely unrelated the subscription is to whatever I signed up for (say I signed up for online image hosting, and they start sending me emails about their fantastic paid backup service) then I mark it as spam even if the unsubscribe button is easy and single-click.
You never become uninterested in something after you subscribe?
I was referring only to the cases where you sign up for X and you get newsletters and whatnot that's not really related to your use of X.
Personally, I think if you voluntarily subscribed, it's not too much of an effort to click a button after the link to confirm the subscription. If you didn't, then you should mark them as spam regardless of their unsubscription link.
[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html#sec9.1...
I mark dozens of mails as spam everyday and I keep getting them back by the same sender.
Block means block, not unsubscribe.
I have been to conferences in computational linguistics and machine learning. It is clear that some conferences are giving or selling e-mail addresses to other conferences. I don't really mind getting e-mails from related conferences, it seems that over time there has been much topic drift as my e-mail address has been handed from conference organiser to conference organiser.
Unfortunately, since the conferences are all organised by separate entities, it is not possible to unsubscribe anymore. And unfortunately, this was before I started using '+' extensions to create custom addresses.
They do quite often (heck, all the time, in fact) do "swaps", where they will mail another org's piece to their own list in return for the same. These emails will usually seek to get you to give up your contact details in return for something (a whitepaper, an interview transcript, even the conference brochure), thus adding you to the new org's list as well.
But the key point is you should always be able to unsubscribe from the first org and hear no more from them or their "marketing partners".
I think most would see it as unprofessional, bad business and cavalier with regard to privacy to actually give lists of email addresses to other organisations.
Of course, there are also some very big conference organisers out there, and they may well be pushing all sorts of unrelated events through their in-house lists. Once again, a simple unsubscribe should do the trick.
Maybe these are the sorts of things that other conference organizers cluck their tongues at when they're having drinks at conference conferences. But from the attendee side, it's difficult to distinguish which might be which.
Meanwhile I'm trying to imagine how deathly a conference conference would be...
It won't really help with people who just send stuff over and over to a home-made list that is kept in an Excel spreadsheet and never clean the undeliverables or unsubscribes out of it.
And it certainly wont help with the pills and stocks brigade.
If GMail's response to this kind of signal is aggressive enough, it also gives an incentive for legitimate-ish senders to offer one-click unsubscribe links, to decrease the number of cases where someone presses 'unsubscribe' but then doesn't jump through some second hoop.
So yeah, I'd say this has some advantages for dealing with a wide range of scum.
Or maybe just tested adding it. Damn, I should've used it. I though it was neat.
1. In principle and according to Can-Spam, all marketing e-mails should have an unsubscribe link.
2. But clicking on the link doesn't do what you think it does.
3. After you've clicked on advertiser A's link, he can't mail you again (not that some don't cheat and mail again anyway).
4. BUT -- Advertiser A can legally pass his "unsubscribe" list to advertiser B, or make it part of a widely distributed list for use by other advertisers, LEGALLY. Oh -- did I forget to mention that this is legal?
Before Can-Spam, the standard advice was never to reply to a spam e-mail. But for some reason, after Can-Spam, people got the idea that it was their civic duty to click "unsubscribe" links, even though this identifies your e-mail address as read by a human, and thereby makes it a hot property in the spam business.
Why don't people understand that Can-Spam just made things worse, and that otherwise nothing has changed?
CAN SPAM was an unusually honestly named federal law to preempt the restrictive anti-spam measures states were adopting and ensuring that marketers subject to US law can spam consumers.
This was widely observed at the time the measure was being considered.
Indeed it was, even by politicians informed on the issues, but to no effect at all.
What companies do you know of that are doing this?
I wonder how it identifies the link? CAN-SPAM doesn't require the link be called "Unsubscribe" - it could be "Stop Receiving Emails From Us" or something like that. Hopefully it will avoid false positives like a patio11-type informative email with a link to an article on "Limiting the Unsubscribes" or something.
I ask because it seems like a useful feature and I just want to make sure that my site takes advantage of it.
Also i found out a while back that after unsubscribing from some lists i started getting a lot of spam from all kinds of lists to which i never subscribed before which let me to believe that some mailing lists will actually release/sell their unsubscribed lists to others. Btw this was tested on brand new email accounts with only one mailing list subscribed at the time.
has unsubscribe link > mark as spamConversely, emails you get in which you can only subscribe through a link in the email or elsewhere is almost always some shit you never signed up to, thus, spam.
I hope this means Gmail will now support List-Unsubscribe in their UI. Last time I checked they didn't with my own old email marketer: https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-hackandtell/blob/master/list...
care to back up your opinion with some facts? Because in my opinion majority of b2b advertising is driven by email.
I had a list for people who read my books and want to get early previews of new material - kind of insiders view into new thinking, more an irregular newsletter than any form of advertising. every single person manually subscribed to the list, there was never any spam, but e-mail open rates on the list have been dropping over the last few years to the point that I stopped sending it out last year. Of course, content might be at fault, but the engagement among the group that opened the e-mail was still good, so I guess this was collateral damage of the general trend in fighting circular e-mail.
I read an article in HBR a few months ago that people mostly now get notifications on mobile devices, so the logical step for promotional marketing (soft spam) would I guess be to move to mobile apps. the stuff that I was sending out wasn't really suited for that, but if I started the whole thing again I'd probably do it with a mobile app.
I tend to do quarterly purges of the periodic emails I find myself subscribed to. This is fantastic.
how do I unsubscribe to google ads
I wish I could unsubscribe from everything at once.