19 June 2009

Marketing Email Opt Out? Let's Make It Very, Very Difficult!

We all have to deal with too many email messages. Sometimes you opt in for something, or it's a requirements for access to some service, and some time later you want to opt out again.

Well, one email too many from Haymarket Publishing (I can't really remember choosing to opt in for 3Dconferences anyway) and I copied the unsubscribe hyperlink (like http://ecm.hbpl.co.uk/public/unsubscribe.jsp but with some additional parameter values) into a secured browser to visit the unsubscribe form:

Screen capture of Haymarket's publication unsubscribe form with introductory text, a text field for email address and a (disabled) submit button

But the email text field was not activated—I could not tab to or click on the field to enter my email address. The field had the disabled attribute set:

Partial source code for the above form showing the attribute 'disabled' in the text field

Usability failure. Accessibility failure. Security challenge. Well, not so much a challenge as a minor annoyance.

Don't Haymarket Media Group check their response forms? Cynical people might suggest they don't want people to opt out from their mailings. However, allowing user to unsubscribe from marketing emails is not an optional obligation. The The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 states:

A person may send or instigate the sending of electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing where ...the recipient has been given a simple means of refusing ... and, where he did not initially refuse the use of the details, at the time of each subsequent communication.

Oh, and where are the privacy policy and company contact details?

Compliance failure.

Posted on: 19 June 2009 at 09:31 hrs

Comments (3) | Permalink | Send | Post to Twitter

Comments

Comments are filtered automatically and should appear shortly after they been checked.

Shows that allowing your users to remove themselves easily is just as important as getting them to sign up in the first place.

What if you'd just happened to want to change email addresses? Haymarket Media Group would have lost you as a customer over this detail.

best
Caroline Jarrett
http://www.formsthatwork.com

1 Added by Caroline Jarrett Posted on 20 June 2009 at 16:51 hrs

Yes Caroline. Quite often much of the development effort is put into the major functionality of a website, but it's the detail across the whole site that's important for site stickiness, development of trust, search engine optimisation and customer retention.

2 Added by Clerkendweller Posted on 22 June 2009 at 11:50 hrs

Hi, i have read this and i am agree to Clerkendweller, that are the important things that must you have so it will go fine. anyway thanks for the share and info here.

3 Added by wordpress themes Posted on 29 June 2009 at 05:05 hrs