For those who work in companies that subscribe users to emails, when users unsubscribe, what portion of them say they "never signed up for this"?
Obviously not looking for hyperaccurate answers, just in general, how many people tend to unsubscribe from promotional emails and how many tick the option "I never signed up for this"?
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
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.
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.
Not an answer to your question, but yesterday I was annoyed that I unsubscribed to an email list and there wasn't an option to select that I never signed up for it. My email address has my first initial in it - and my user name does not stand for JulieBalls, seeing that my name isn't Julie. However, that doesn't stop Julie for signing me up for all sorts of shitty emails like "Hi Julie, Rand Paul needs your support to fight Facist Fauci", "Julie, this is Reverend Fuck Knuckles and I need you to pray for Trump", etc.
When I unsubscribe from these lists they usually make me select an option like "I'm no longer interested in this content." I'm like "bitch, I was never interested in your trash-ass content!"
I was on Gmail back in the invite-only days, so I got a good address. By now, I have had about a dozen different people do this to me. Some are very persistent in believing that my address is theirs.
I had one couple who used my address for everything. They ordered a laptop with my email. ITunes, Netflix, disney+. They'd signed up for USPS's informed delivery with my account. I could have stolen so much shit from them over the years. But I always tried to correct the issue.
It finally stopped when they used my email for their wedding registry. Instead of trying once again to do the right thing, I logged into the registry, removed all of their tasteful items, added a faux tigerskin rug (the kind with the whole head at one end), a bunch of this jewel-tone stuffed curvy furniture that would be perfect for a 70s fuckroom, clown-themed carnival games, a popcorn cart, and a shitload of baby items.
Not a lot of companies actually look at/care about that metric.
It's more there for the providers of the email sending to identify spammy customers who are using it to hit up people without an actual business relationship to them.
I work at a small SaaS company that sells software to Higher Ed. Our marketing email is entirely separate from our product email. The marketing emails are a nuisance and I don't have a lot of info on them. The product emails I have to monitor the bounce rate and complaint rate to keep our email reputation up and ensure deliverability.
People still check the box that they didn't sign up for email even though every email sent out of the product is opt-in. I assume it's usually because someone's boss decided they needed to get a specific email report or something.
Our complaint rate is still super low though, lower than .01%.
I think some of the data in the reports that people subscribe to is only useful for a limited time window, and then eventually people are getting weekly emails with information they no longer need (or is no longer valid). People then unsubscribe to the entire 'report' notification type instead of the individual report. Ideally development will make that easier to manage within the product in the future.
If they're using a service to send the emails, like SendGrid or Mailchimp or something, that Unsubscribe survey is actually hosted by the email sending provider, and the more people that mark the email as spam or use the "I never signed up for this" option or similar, the worse it makes the user of the mail sending service look. If they used Sendgrid for example to send a mass email to 10k people, if more than 5% Unsubscribe or mark as spam or use the "I never signed up for this", the company might get their account locked down by Sendgrid until there's an investigation as to why they sent spam.
Professional marketer here, all of the unsub rates in this thread look nominal (0.1-0.2%).
Also, when we run third party distribution campaigns, a large amount of people, I can look at their hotjar journey and watch in real time their mouse movements as they download a whitepaper, then we call them and they say they never downloaded it.
It's a mix of lying to the annoying marketing company (I get it), and just plain forgetting you did it.
I switched from Hearthstone Deck Tracker to Firestone Deck Tracker yesterday, I'm not entirely sure if I checked to see I wasn't signing up for marketing emails, it's that easy.
Not to mention, I can buy just about any non-EU email address i want on demand.
Also, when we run third party distribution campaigns, a large amount of people, I can look at their hotjar journey and watch in real time their mouse movements as they download a whitepaper, then we call them and they say they never downloaded it.
This shit pisses me off. If I'm forced to enter my e-mail address to download a white paper, that should not be considered consent to spam me. My company gates our whitepapers behind e-mail/personal details as well. I just put in my marketing team's personal contact info when I have to download something from our own website. Make them eat their own shit.
thats funny but if you gave me a real name and a fake email, it gets run through data normalization and I'd likely get your real email.
If you just give me the company name, fake name and email, it's possible that if you met our qualification procedure, we'd just dig out the best looking person at the company (head of department, procurement manager, vice president?) and start contacting them based on "institutional buying intent."
Some examples, "Get me the email address of the VP of ITOps at every company who had series C and beyond funding in Q1 of 2022" - done. "Get me the email of the Head of Business Intelligence at Acme Ltd's Ohio office" - done. "Get me the email of Tim Smith, he works in Sales at Nike" - done.
Also, when we run third party distribution campaigns, a large amount of people, I can look at their hotjar journey and watch in real time their mouse movements as they download a whitepaper, then we call them and they say they never downloaded it.
Can you elaborate a bit on this?
If I'm understanding you correctly, you send out marketing stuff via email, and then you call the ones who clicked through to the landing page did whatever?
Not the person you are replying to you, but I used to do email marketing for JP Morgan long time ago and we could provide heat maps of where people's mouses were hovering most of the time on our emails and people higher up than me would use that information to tell me where to lay out the links so that people might accidentally click links and get a better click-through rate
yes. Some of the data is anonymized but there are ways around it (i.e. someone downloaded something at 2am and they were the only user, I can work out it's you from the time stamps)
But I can watch your mouse move around the screen as if I was filming you with my phone (obviously only your mouse pointer, I can't see your other windows or into your bedroom etc)
edit: you were asking something slightly different, yes I absolutely can see if you clicked on my email.
For some big important people, I can even get a push notification to my phone if you visit my webpage.
Nobody, but our company delivers extremely niche health insurance market information exclusively to paid clients. Absolutely none of our clients are getting emails they didn't ask for and if their preferences change we have an extremely robust and granular interest system that we adjust to make sure they're getting everything they want the way they want.
It's a very different business from those assholes that require you to subscribe to their marketing bullshit to use their service though. In my personal life I've opted in to subscribing to about dozen things voluntarily... everything else gets spam marked.
I’m sorry, I can’t answer your question, but I have experienced companies lying about their email marketing opt-ins.
I placed an order with a company (it was the NEC in Birmingham) and distinctly remember clicking the “I do not consent” box and got emails anyways. I contacted them and asked them to look into it, guessing it was a bug. They got back to me and said it wasn’t possible for that to happen, and I must have misremembered.
I signed up for a new account, explicitly ensuring I was opting out from emails, with a fresh email address then logged in to check my communication preferences - the account was opted in.
I contacted them with this information and they basically wrote me back apologising that I had been misinformed, but letting me know that they were still legally in the clear and that the checkbox was actually just a “nicety” that they didn’t need, and that they relied on legitimate interest rather than user consent for marketing.
Red Funnel Ferries recently sent a survey to, from the looks of it, everyone who had ever booked online with them.
My guess is that they gave the "wrong" email database to the survey company. The one that for GDPR reasons, probably wasn't supposed to exist any more.
Nobody signs up for spam. They just get the old "Don't click here if you don't want not to be never contacted about special offers!" box the wrong way round.