Contrary to what many marketers think, most consumers will use unsubscribe buttons when they want off a list, and when they say: “This is spam,” they usually mean it, according to a recent study by Return Path.
When asked how they typically act when they no longer want to receive e-mail from a company, 43% of respondents to the deliverability company’s third annual holiday e-mail consumer survey said they sometimes use unsubscribe links and 24% said they use them all the time. Just 7% said they never use them, according to Return Path.
This isn’t to say that consumers don’t hit “this is spam” when they simply want off a list, however. Forty one percent of respondents said they sometimes use the “this is spam” button to opt out while 14% said they use it all the time, according to Return Path.
However, the fact that 67% said they use unsubscribe buttons either all or some of the time says that most consumers aren’t as ignorant of the various unsubscribe mechanisms at their disposal as marketers often suppose, according to Stephanie Miller, vice president of strategic services for Return Path.
“There is a perception among many e-mail marketers that somehow the ISPs are encouraging subscribers to hit the ‘this is spam’ button, and that, of course, has a negative effect on the marketer because it can affect deliverability,” said Miller. “Our data suggest that consumers do, in fact, trust the unsubscribe button [supplied by the marketer] and that many of them go there first.”
Miller added that if the marketer has a weak or troublesome unsubscribe process, consumers will abandon it and try another means to stop receiving the e-mail.
“But if your unsub works, most subscribers will look for that if they really want to unsubscribe,” she said. “That suggests that complaint data is more accurate than many marketers like to think.”
Further underscoring the likelihood that consumers understand more about their e-mail inboxes than most marketers suspect is that 33% of respondents said they’ll sometimes set up a filter to block unwanted e-mail and 21% said they use e-mail filters all the time, according to Return Path.
“Setting up a filter is not trivial,” said Miller.
Meanwhile, for the third year in a row, 55.9% of respondents cited knowing and trusting the sender as a key reason they will choose to open an e-mail, making familiarity and trust the No. 1 user-cited reason they’ll interact with marketers’ messages.
The second biggest reason people gave for having opened an e-mail—cited by 51.2%—was that they previously opened e-mail from the sender and found it valuable.
