The one group  of businesses I expect to have their unsubscribe process spot on are retailers – especially online retailers.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable, they are completely customer focused, familiar with technology and have been using the internet for some time now!

I think someone needs to let play.com in on the secret – sorry guys!

In a New Year clearout I decided to purge my personal email of subscription emails….it’s a dumping ground email address for me when I buy things online, but I finally tired of all the scintillating offers and decided to decamp. This soon became an odyssey of critiquing Unsubscribe processes – teensy bit relevant to me as we run many email campaigns for our customers, and frankly, I’m a bit nosy.

Firstly, the myth of bigger companies and retailers being more on the ball – how wrong could I be!

Art.com impressed me the most, not only was the process painless and quick, they’ d taken the time to create an appealing page that said how sorry they were to see me go. Very sweet (didn’t stop me, but I would still buy from them, which is the point).

A few sites from very small retailers impressed me with their painless unsubscribes..and then I clicked on the Play.com one.

Step 1: I was presented with a login screen – well if I’m unsubscribing, I probably haven’t bought anything for ages, and I’m damned if I can remember that password!

Step 2: Yup, you guessed it, so then I had to go through a multi-step forgotten password process (I won’t bore you with that one)

Step 3: (Correct, I am persistent) finally get logged in and am presented with an Account Settings page.  The Unsubscribe feature is in a box called Change Newsletter Settings, placed at the bottom of the page, below the fold.

Step 4: Radio button located, I selected it. Sentence appears confirming update (but no acknowledgement that I had unsubscribed, or would be missed – sniff)

Then to top it all off, the next day, guess who I received a newsletter from? Yup, you guessed it, my good friends at Play.com!

This isn’t a diatribe against Play.com – they do the selling bit very well!

But, it is just lack of attention to detail- Unsubscribe is not something that’s hard to get right – just place what the customer wants at the heart of the process, make it easy, make it fast and tell ‘em you’ll miss em!!!

B2B Marketing · customer service · play.com · unsubscribes