The challenge
Ensuring that a company doesn't fall foul of the rules associated with sending bulk emails has become more critical over recent years, and as an ecommerce company, Red Gate needed the deliverability of their emails to be certain. Getting black-listed costs real money.
We needed an effortless way for people to opt-out of all emails or change their preferences.
This is a tricky balance as the business gains great value from sending emails, yet the recipient very much needs to be in control of what they recieve. An important consideration is that a user disgruntled with one email, doesn't unsubscribe from emails they might still value by mistake.
The process
This was a big project as it touched many parts of the company, from sales, marketing, development and support across multiple product lines and businesses. Working with our internal devops team we mapped out all of the email channels we had and how these might logically be grouped so we could reduce the number of decisions a user might need to make:
The outcome
After many iterations we eventually simplified it down to a couple of interactions.
Any email sent would contain two links, an "Unsubscribe" and a "Change what I get sent" link. Because unsubscribe could remove them entirely from many different email lists, we wanted to be sure that the user knew this to be the case - maybe they still wanted their .net develpement newsletter, but didn't care to receive one for SQL Server.
I designed the page to ask a question and give an immediate sense of apology, using one of my own photos that hopefully struck the right balance.
Crucially, we offer the user an obvious unsubscribe from everything option (a strict requirement) as well as an option that we hope they might try before leaving us:
If they choose to change their email preferences, then the language is clear and helpful with obvious ways to unsubscribe or re-subscribe to any of the email categories we identified:
If the user unsubscribes from all categories on the preferences page (or directly on the landing page) then we clearly convey this in a pop up. This also offers the user an option to tell us what we could have done differently so that we can learn from our mistakes:
